Though it is always dangerous to become enmeshed in the “might-have-beens” of history, a number of turning-points in the war may be suggested. First, there was the fall of Mendès-France in 1955, after which the best hope of reforms and a gentle slope towards an Algerian solution that might have been acceptable to the majority of Muslim moderates diminished, if not vanished. Then there was the wasted opportunity of that period of hope and euphoria on all sides which followed the advent of de Gaulle during the summer of 1958. Finally, for France, there was the slim hope of a paix des braves as represented by the Si Salah episode of 1960. Seen from the F.L.N. point of view, the red-letter dates from November 1954 onward might begin with the Bandung Conference of 1955, internationalising the “Algerian problem”; followed by the Soummam Conference of 1956 and the self-defeating error by France, which shortly succeeded it, of sequestrating Ben Bella and his colleagues; then came de Gaulle’s admission of the principle of “self-determination”, a real watershed in the war. In January 1960 “Barricades Week” ended with de Gaulle triumphant, but the cause of Algérie française ruined. December of the same year saw de Gaulle’s policy of “association” ruined by the Muslim demonstrations in Algiers and victory at the United Nations, while the generals’ putsch of April 1961 — the most dangerous moment both for de Gaulle and the Western world — marked the inevitability of de Gaulle being forced to negotiate bilaterally with the F.L.N. Finally, the O.A.S. campaign opening in the summer of 1961 was to signify the collapse of any hope of a pied noir future in independent Algeria.
On the other hand, even if the O.A.S. had never raised its ugly head, the extraordinarily rigid consistency of the F.L.N.’s demands ever since the earliest days leads one to question whether, once the last hope of a compromise with the “third force” Muslim moderates had been peeled away, any solution could have been reached that would have guaranteed the survival of the pied noir minority in Algeria indefinitely. Taking into account the huge discrepancy in wealth, property and land between the two communities — nine-tenths belonging to one-tenth — the excruciating land hunger of the Algerians coupled to their soaring birthrate, racial stresses and pied noir intolerance, and — perhaps above all — the accumulated hatreds of seven and a half years of war, could the Europeans realistically have remained more than a few additional years at best?[3] Without the O.A.S. the departure of the pieds noirs could probably have been “phased out” more gently, less tragically, over a period of years and months rather than days. But, just conceivably, the verdict of history may be that the enactment of so brutally sharp and absolute an exodus was more realistic — possibly even more merciful — in the long run. Was Boumedienne’s, rather than Krim’s more tolerant, line the right one after all in 1962?
Then there is the role of the Communist world in the Algerian war. At many points in the war it has been seen how cautious was the moral support given the F.L.N. by the French Communist Party, when not actively hostile, and how limited and tardy were the arms shipments it received from the Soviet Union. The poor Soviet performance was to set up resentments that would continue to influence Algerian policies three decades after the war. On the other hand, the Eastern bloc did furnish throughout a lever, without which the F.L.N. would probably have been unable to manoeuvre de Gaulle into negotiating, finally, on their terms.
One is left with the controversial role of de Gaulle, criticised both for going too slow and too fast. As far as the latter reproach goes, in the last stages of negotiations he suffered from the lesson not learned by Kissinger in Vietnam, or perhaps by the Israelis vis-à-vis the Arab world, or by the South Africans; namely, that peoples who have been waiting for their independence for a century, fighting for it for a generation, can afford to sit out a presidential term, or a year or two in the life of an old man in a hurry; that he who lasts the longest wins; that, sadly, with the impatience of democracies and their volatile voters committed to electoral contortions every four or five years, the extremist generally triumphs over the moderate. Just keep on being obdurate, don’t deviate from your maximum terms, was the lesson handed down by the F.L.N. and remains as grimly valid today — whether for Northern Ireland or the Middle East or southern Africa. One after another de Gaulle saw his principles for peace eroded in the face of the F.L.N.’s refusal to compromise. As his disillusion grew, so did his resolve to liquidate the war with all speed. In this final haste injustices were perpetrated, such as the exclusion from the peace talks of any representative Algerian faction (e.g. the M.N.A.) other than the F.L.N. Yet de Gaulle did liquidate that savage war.
When all is said and done, de Gaulle’s achievement was immense, and the gratitude owed him by France as well as the Western world no less. As ex-Premier Debré remarked to the author, “It was a miracle that we didn’t collapse into civil war after Algeria; and this we owed to de Gaulle.” The prosperous stability of post-1962 France stems to an important extent from the consequences of de Gaulle’s coolness and sense of timing in May 1958, and his steadfast refusal then to come back as the army’s man. If he had been strictly “straight” with the Massus, Challes and Salans all along, could the disastrous putsch of 1961 have been avoided? On the other hand, recalling the dangerously delicate balances of May 1958, might not such blinding honesty simply have brought about de Gaulle’s over-throw and replacement by a military junta in 1959 or 1960, or even late 1958 — leading possibly to civil war in France itself? Had de Gaulle lost his deadly game with the army, France might well have undergone an experience similar to Portugal’s — a right-wing military dictatorship, followed by collapse and left-wing ascendance, when it was at last realised that the “colonial” war in Algeria could never be won. His sibylline secrecy and ambiguities, his dubious promises and his cautious timing, may have prolonged the war and increased the uncertainty of the pieds noirs, and the way he extricated France from Algeria may not have been done well — but certainly no one else could have done it better. Perhaps the best summing up came from the aged leader of those other dark days of 1940, Paul Reynaud: “The war did not end in favourable conditions, but in the only conditions that were possible.”
For the rest of the modern world (and not least Southern Africa), the French experience in the Algerian War — a prototype of its kind — continued to offer its compelling lessons, most of them painful, for anyone prepared to heed them. There was the failure of a materially mighty Western power to combat a civil insurrection equipped with little more than ideology, without resort to the means one condemns in one’s enemy; in Algeria, the instrument of torture, as well as being fundamentally wicked in itself, was proved to be a boomerang weapon. There was the failure of the West to comprehend Third World aspirations; and the failure of the moderates everywhere to prevail against the extremist minority on either side; the Gironde is sent packing by the Montagne.
France, ten years on: the “pieds noirs” assimilated
Ten years after the liquidation of the Algerian war, the face that France showed to the world was, once again, that of a truly great power, more self-confident than she had been at any time since before 1914, and certainly more prosperous in material terms. The economic revival of France under the stewardship of de Gaulle has been one of the miracles of the Western world, second only to Federal Germany’s recovery after 1945. No more remarkable yard-stick of it exists than the way in which France assimilated the over one million pieds noirs who flooded to her shores.[4] The adaptation of the uprooted pieds noirs to their new homes has been no easy process. Of the thirty thousand who went to hot and dusty Alicante on account of its resemblance to Oran, many — like an eminent ophthalmologist who started a night club rather than practise his profession, because that involved taking out Spanish papers — never felt at home there, despite their Spanish origins. “The pieds noirs of Alicante, when they stroll along the sea-shore,” wrote Le Monde, “invariably gaze to the other side of the Mediterranean. In Alicante they are still in exile.” Viticulturists of Alsatian stock who went to found vineyards
in Corsica found themselves plastiqué once again — this time by jealous and less industrious Corsicans. Of the pieds noirs who headed for northern France, their “souls died”, says Anne Loesch with sad nostalgia. Of herself, exiled in a grey Paris, she wrote, “I yearn to run across the beach and look at the sun dying in the sea.”
So most of them stuck where the sun was, in the Midi, generally close to Marseilles. Some built colonies of white houses with flat roofs and patios and bougainvillaea over the door, to remind them of their lost homes. But if they sought climatic warmth, they did not necessarily find it in the hearts of their neighbours. Too often the provençaux regarded them as an alien race, as threatening competition, calling them sales pieds noirs much as they in turn had once scorned the melons and ratons of Algeria, and barring their homes to them. Sometimes the local village grocer would make a point of short-changing his ingenuous pied noir customers. When the farmers went shooting, memories of nightmares from years past would reassert themselves, causing children to shout in terror, “The Arabs are attacking!” Adults, when describing their new lives in France, would still look instinctively over their shoulders, in case the O.A.S. might be listening: “You never know; it’s all still so close.…” If they missed the cheap domestic help of the fatmas, the exiles also claimed to miss the companionship of the “good Arab” and the whole ambience of the Muslim world in which they had grown up. The first state aid they received from France — subsistence allowance of 450 (new) francs per couple per month, déménagement loans of 20,000 francs — was far from generous. Many who had lived in modest comfort in Algeria found themselves reduced to the fringe of poverty; some took up with former members of the O.A.S., smuggling heroin and running protection rackets in Marseilles, extorting money from other pieds noirs. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1960s, such was the absorptive power of France’s booming economy, it could be claimed that, by and large, there was no “pied noir problem”.
The same could not be said about the other side of the coin, the Algerian immigrant workers in France. Granted certain preferential treatment by Evian, driven from home by persistent unemployment to prosperous, labour-hungry Europe, their numbers had mounted steadily ever since the war ended, until by 1973 they were close on 800,000. For the most part these Algerians lived like third-class citizens, their plight concealed from the eyes of other Frenchmen. Existing in rat-infested bidonvilles, or six to a tenement room, without women and on the poor food that their rock-bottom wages would provide, over eighty per cent of the Algerian workers performed the travaux pénibles; generally the heavy, dangerous or distasteful labour eschewed by Frenchmen. Nearly three-quarters of them were illiterate, and therefore unlikely ever to better themselves. But every year they were able to send home an impressive total of one milliard francs (then £100m.), vital to the Algerian economy. With relations seldom brilliant between the French proletariat and the sweated-labour Algerians, in the summer of 1973 there was a major explosion after a white bus-driver had his throat slit in the centre of Marseilles by an apparently unhinged Algerian. Suddenly it seemed as if the war was starting again: whites machine-gunned Algerian cafés in the city and threw Molotov cocktails into their lodgings; a sixteen-year-old boy was shot down by men in a moving car. In Toulouse fifty paras rampaged through the streets on a ratonnade, beating up any North African they encountered. “We have had enough,” shrilled a right-wing Marseilles newspaper, Le Méridional: “Enough of Algerian thieves. Enough of Algerian vandals. Enough of Algerian loudmouths. Enough of Algerian troublemakers. Enough of Algerian syphilitics. Enough of Algerian rapists.…” In Algiers a furious Boumedienne halted all further emigration and declared that — regardless of the cost — he would bring all his compatriots home from France if they could not be properly protected. But, such were mutual needs of inter-dependence in what the Algerians call “the damned inheritance”, the breach was swiftly healed. Ten years later the Algerian work force in France still numbered approximately three-quarters of a million.
And so, imported across the Mediterranean, the prickly relationship between Algerian and Frenchman, Algerian and pied noir, French and pied noir, continued with but little reprieve.
What happened to them? The “Centurions”
In the fullness of time, de Gaulle’s modernisation of the post-Algerian army resulted in the most sweeping metamorphosis. Many famous regiments, some of them the toughest fighting units in the West since 1945, and whose names had held the limelight for so many years, so many campaigns, disappeared or were totally transformed. For a time even the legendary Foreign Legion seemed doomed. The great bronze globe from its Beau Geste parade ground at Sidi-Bel-Abbès was uprooted, then reinstated at a new headquarters in Aubagne, outside Marseilles. Once masters over infinite miles of desert, mountain and rice paddy, within the limits of France’s shrunken empire the Legion found its sphere of operations confined to small islands like Corsica, Tahiti and Martinique. Most of those who had led it through Vietnam and the Algerian war disappeared rapidly. In the army as a whole, senior officers — the men of forty in Algeria — weighed down by all the burden of bad dreams and stresses that the past had imposed on their beloved army, left prematurely, settled down to writing their memoirs, or withdrew entirely. General André Beaufre, France’s greatest military thinker, who resigned rather than take command over a still bitterly divided army, died early. General Gambiez, the ill-starred Commander-in-Chief at the time of the 1961 generals’ putsch, retired in 1967 and took up writing history. Colonel Trinquier, the tough para leader during the Battle of Algiers, went to Katanga as a mercenary before the end of the Algerian war, then retired to devote himself to viticulture. The ace of all the paras, and prototype of Lartéguy’s Centurion colonel, Marcel Bigeard, was one of the few to remain in the service and attain the ultimate heights. A four-star general in 1975, Bigeard was appointed State Secretary in the Ministry of Defence by President Giscard to “remoralise” the army and purge it of the revolutionary and “permissive” elements sapping it from within.
Finally, the controversial and forceful General Massu was to perform one further role of greatest moment. Reprimanded in 1962 for publicly demanding the release of his fellow generals imprisoned after the 1961 putsch, then appointed, nevertheless, to command French forces in Germany, in the critical month of May 1968 the ever-loyal Massu received a secret visit from de Gaulle, who wanted to be reassured of Massu’s and the army’s support in the event of deepening internal trouble in France. Massu gave him the required assurance, apparently on the condition of de Gaulle granting an act of grace for the imprisoned officers. Later that year, de Gaulle proclaimed an amnesty for all those under sentence for acts committed during the war. Massu then went into semi-retirement with a small office in the Invalides, writing two fearlessly outspoken books on the Battle of Algiers. At the time of President Giscard’s conciliatory state visit of 1975, Massu declared that he too would be happy to return to Algeria and “shake M. Boumedienne’s hand” — if invited.
The “fallen angels”
Of the army’s “fallen angels”, some of those who managed to escape the long arm of French justice had adventurous careers. Broizat, the monastic para colonel of “Barricades Week”, was one of the last O.A.S. leaders to leave Algeria; he fled to Spain, then migrated to New Caledonia to dedicate himself to religion. Pierre Sergent, leader of the O.A.S. in France, and sentenced to death in absentia, went into hiding in Belgium, Holland and Germany under various pseudonyms until the 1968 amnesty, when he returned to France. Colonel Jean Gardes, after dodging arrest in Spain, made his way to Argentina, where — remembering some of his mother’s recipes from the Restaurant des Ministères — he established an unmilitary but extremely successful business making pâtés. On the amnesty he too returned to Paris. Averse to reading the many books about the Algerian war, he is fed “digests” by his wife and is distressed when not enough is made of his lasting attachment to the Muslims of Algeria. Godard, the expert on counter-revolutionary war, even
tually took refuge in Belgium after the collapse of the O.A.S. in 1962, but — unlike most of his colleagues — he did not return home after the 1968 amnesty. Running a small factory near Mons and tending his aviary, he became increasingly embittered and died at an early age in 1975. Of those who spent time in French gaols, Argoud — sentenced to life imprisonment after his humiliating kidnap by the barbouzes — was also released in 1968. Since then, with a mystic belief that he could determine character from handwriting, he set himself up as a graphologist in the Vosges, remarried, spending his leisure time playing the piano and preparing his memoirs, grandiloquently called Decadence, Imposture and Tragedy.
Of the quarteron of generals imprisoned after the 1961 putsch, only Zeller did not write his memoirs, and none of them continued to see each other. Salan energetically produced books at the rate of a volume a year, well into his seventies. Always the elegant “Mandarin”, with silver hair lightly tinted mauve or saffron, according to his mood, he lived in a comfortable Paris apartment surrounded by gilded buddhas, carved elephant tusks, opium pipes and all the artefacts of the Far East which he so loved. His pension was restored, and his many decorations for valour — but not his campaign ribbons, nor his rank. Nevertheless, “though I am just plain Monsieur Raoul Salan, everybody calls me mon général and they often salute me in the street!” he would claim. He spoke unashamedly and without reservation of all that was past, and visitors would often be taken aback to hear a full general, who once reigned over commands comparable to those of an Eisenhower or a Montgomery, describing his prison life with the relish of an old lag: “It was difficult getting used to obeying whistles, you know … The Santé was bad; the gardes mobiles were really not at all nice … Tulle was better … But the worst was being locked up at 11 p.m. and the doors not opened until 7 a.m.; I can assure you, we were not spoilt!” In 1984 Salan died, not quite surviving to see the thirtieth anniversary of the war in which he played so equivocal a role.
A Savage War of Peace Page 81