Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  * * *

  fn1 In France the Directeur de Cabinet is a political appointee comparable to Chief of Staff in the US system. The nearest equivalent in Britain is Principal Private Secretary, but the Directeur also has many of the powers of a Permanent Secretary. There is also a Chef de Cabinet, which is rendered here as Private Secretary. At the French President’s and Prime Minister’s offices, this hierarchy is headed by a Secretary-General, also a political appointee. Confusingly, the same post exists in the French Foreign Ministry, but there describes the top permanent official.

  fn2 Mitterrand’s portfolio encompassed French West and Equatorial Africa; the Oceanic territories (New Caledonia, Tahiti, Wallis and Futuna, the Marquesas); St Pierre et Miquelon; Pondicherry and four other French trading posts in India. Tunisia and Morocco were the responsibility of the Foreign Ministry. Algeria, which was divided into three départements and considered to be part of France, came under the Interior Ministry, as did the French West Indies, French Guiana, and the Indian Ocean island of Réunion. Indochina was handled by a newly established Ministry for Associated States.

  6

  Requiem for Empire

  AS PEACE RETURNED to Indochina, a new conflict was unfolding which would also last eight years and would have much more far-reaching consequences. The conflagration in Algeria would bring France to the brink of civil war. By the time it ended, more than a million French men, women and children would have been uprooted from their homes; the French Union, fig leaf for an Empire which had outlived its time, would be swept away; and the Fourth Republic, another survival from a bygone age, would founder.

  The opening skirmishes were played out at the margins, in Tunisia and Morocco. In both countries, French protectorates rather than colonies, pressure for internal self-government had been building since the war. In 1952, the Tunisian nationalist leader, Habib Bourguiba, had been detained, triggering widespread unrest. That winter, after French settlers murdered Bourguiba’s deputy, the violence spread to neighbouring Morocco. In Casablanca, the army used tanks to quell rioters. Moroccan nationalists were lynched by European mobs. Dozens died and there were hundreds of arrests.

  The Sultan of Morocco, Mohammed V, had a rival, the Pasha of Marrakesh, whom the Right regarded as more malleable. The conservative government of Joseph Laniel, which took power six months later, decided the Sultan should go. At a Cabinet meeting on August 19, Mitterrand protested that removing him would solve nothing. The government, he said, was abdicating its responsibilities to the settlers and the local French officials they controlled. ‘After a few months the same problems will arise all over again . . . The former Sultan, in his exile, will [become] the symbol of revolution and the hero of national independence.’ Several other ministers supported him. But to no effect. The following day the Sultan was deposed and exiled to Corsica. Mitterrand threatened to resign but allowed himself to be persuaded not to.

  Next it was the turn of Tunisia. Mitterrand had argued that summer that, if Tunisian nationalism was on the rise, it was because France had failed to give the Tunisians a more attractive alternative:

  Nationalism is a solution of despair resulting from the failure of our policies . . . There are 400 million Muslims in the world, and in the course of the last fifteen years, 370 million of them have acquired . . . their national independence. Just think, only 30 million Muslims remain within a state framework which is . . . not autonomous, and these Muslims are ours, they are French . . . The first duty of France is to do everything to ensure that [our] links with them are not broken . . . that our African brothers remain one with our destiny . . . We will not do that if . . . we remain silent and offer them no future . . . That is what bothers me [about] Tunisia . . . Do you think a State is viable when, to keep order, we have to enforce a state of emergency for fourteen years? Do you really think that is a success story? I say no . . . What matters is to find, for Tunisia and for Morocco . . . the best way [for us] to remain there . . . Once order is restored, [we need] bold and skilful reforms.1

  The analysis was not wrong but the conclusion was addled. If 90 per cent of the world’s Muslims were independent, it should have been blindingly obvious that the other 10 per cent would wish to follow. But neither Mitterrand nor anyone else in the French government was ready to accept that. In 1953, independence for North Africa was unthinkable. Two weeks after the row over Morocco, the Christian Democrat Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, who, in the words of an aide, ‘understood absolutely nothing about nationalism in North Africa’, appointed a hard-line administrator as Tunisia’s new Governor. Mitterrand protested that such a decision should have been discussed by the Cabinet. Bidault retorted acidly: ‘The Cabinet does not discuss what happens in all the villages of France. Tunis is just a village.’ This time Mitterrand did resign.

  Nine months later, Tunisia was in a state of insurrection.

  After Pierre Mendès France took office, no sooner was the ink dry on the Geneva Accords than he set out for Tunis and announced full internal self-government. At the time, he envisaged a transition period of ten years before independence. In the event, Tunisia became independent, with Bourguiba as Prime Minister, in March 1956.

  Morocco was more complicated. Mendès France ruled out any possibility of the Sultan’s return. But Edgar Faure, who succeeded him, soon realised that that would not work. Nationalist agitation grew exponentially: by the spring of 1955, four or five terrorist attacks were taking place each day. Extremist organisations were formed among the 300,000 French settlers, denouncing ‘the rot that has set in due to the incompetence of the useless people who pretend to govern us’. But the ‘White Hand’, as one such group called itself, was no more successful in stemming the tide than its counterpart, the ‘Red Hand’, had been in Tunisia. Faure’s government approved the Sultan’s return in November that year. Over the objections of the Gaullists and Bidault’s Christian Democrats, Morocco became independent two weeks before Tunisia.

  That was the curtain-raiser. Parliament had approved the independence of Tunisia and Morocco on the understanding that there would be a quid pro quo. The protectorates would be allowed to evolve, but Algeria would remain French.

  The main drama was about to begin.

  With hindsight it defies understanding that anyone could have thought that the nine million Arabs of Algeria, where the settler population was one million, would continue to accept colonial rule when their neighbours, Morocco and Tunisia, whose combined Arab population was 11 million, with half a million settlers, had achieved full independence. Nonetheless, that is what the French government firmly believed.

  Since the uprising in Sétif in May 1945, which the army had repressed with terrible bloodshed, Algeria had been quiet. Mitterrand visited Algiers as War Veterans Minister in September 1947, the same week that the French parliament passed legislation allowing Algerians to vote for a regional assembly. The new law provided for two electoral colleges, one for Algerians, the other for French citizens, each electing sixty deputies. The Governor-General, Yves Chataigneau, told the young minister that since Algeria was French, Algerians of all races should have the same rights. But Chataigneau was an exception. His successors aligned themselves with the settlers, closing their eyes when election results were falsified to exclude nationalist representatives.

  A Radical Party senator, Henri Borgeaud, who had extensive land-holdings in the country, explained jovially: ‘Algerian political cooking is done in an Algerian pot by Algerian chefs, by which, of course, I mean Europeans in Algeria.’

  In the late spring of 1954, Mitterrand, then in opposition, tried to organise a conference in Algiers to discuss how the territory should be associated in the future with metropolitan France. The local authorities banned it.2 No one in Algiers wanted to admit that there might be political problems. Everyone was ‘living under the illusion that the only issues were economic and social’.

  As minister, Mitterrand was as blinkered as most of his colleagues about the long-term future of F
rance’s overseas territories. He opposed granting independence to Tunisia and Morocco, arguing that internal autonomy was enough. But he did understand that Algeria could not fail to be affected by the upheavals taking place everywhere else in the Arab world. Tunisia and Morocco were in ferment, Libya was already independent, the Sudan was about to become so, and in Egypt, King Farouk had been deposed and a radical army colonel, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had seized power.

  Mendès France acknowledged later that Mitterrand warned him repeatedly in the summer of 1954 that trouble was brewing in Algeria, but ‘at that time, I did not think it was burning, that it was going to explode. Mitterrand felt it. He sensed early on that there was a risk things would go badly.’

  Shortly after his appointment as Interior Minister, Mitterrand received a report that a former French army sergeant named Ahmed Ben Bella had been sent from Cairo to Libya, where military training camps for young Algerians were believed to have been set up. Ben Bella, the report said, was the leader of a newly formed Liberation Army and was preparing for ‘direct action’. The report was accurate. Ben Bella would later be identified as one of the nine founding members of the revolutionary committee behind the FLN, the Algerian National Liberation Front, which had decided, at a meeting in Cairo that spring, to launch an armed rebellion against French rule.3

  In October, Mitterrand visited Algiers. Publicly he declared himself ‘full of optimism’ that the territory was ‘calm and prosperous’. Privately he told Mendès France on his return that ‘things are getting worse and worse. We are going to have to act very quickly.’ But neither of them yet realised how critical the situation had become.fn14

  Ten days later, on the eve of All Saints, October 31 1954, the FLN launched more than sixty attacks in different parts of Algeria. Police stations were fire-bombed, railway lines sabotaged, telephone lines cut and French settlers attacked. Seven people died. For 24 hours there was pandemonium. The Governor-General requested extra troops. There were no planes to fly them out. The General Staff insisted that, even if planes could be found, there were no troops to be had. The French commander in Algeria panicked, proposing to evacuate isolated areas that were too difficult to defend.

  Then the pendulum swung the other way. Mitterrand reassured the Cabinet: ‘Only about a hundred individuals were involved and at no time did the population follow.’ Mendès maintained that, ‘contrary to what has been said, Algeria is calm’. Later Mitterrand would speak of ‘a few terrorist attacks whose consequences, in my opinion, have been greatly exaggerated’. For a while that seemed to be so. Scattered violence continued, but the army, reinforced by units from Indochina, appeared to have the situation under control.5

  In parliament, the government proclaimed a policy of firmness. ‘There will be neither hesitation nor time-wasting nor half-measures,’ Mendès France declared on November 12. ‘There will be no kid gloves for sedition, no compromise with it, and everyone here and [in Algeria] should know that.’ Mitterrand spoke the same language:

  Algeria is part of France . . . the [three] provinces which make up Algeria are provinces of the French Republic . . . The law applies everywhere [in France], and that law is French law. All those who try, in one way or another, to create disorder and attempt to secede, will be struck down by every means the law puts at our disposal.6

  The previous week Mitterrand had banned a moderate nationalist group, led by Messali Hadj, and ordered the arrests of thousands of its members. It was an error. Messali’s movement had played no part in the attacks. Its dissolution drove its members into the arms of the FLN and deprived the government of an Arab interlocutor. Not that the government had any intention of negotiating. Mitterrand told a parliamentary commission that month that the rebellion made discussion impossible, unless ‘in its terminal form, that of war’.

  The expression reflected his predilection for striking phrases but was ill-chosen, for in subbed-down form in the newspapers it became, ‘in Algeria the only form of negotiation is war’, which was not quite what he had said. Yet it conveyed well enough his attitude. Neither he nor Mendès France understood the depth of the Arab revolt. Both believed that ‘merciless repression’ was necessary to put down the rebellion and that moderate reforms would suffice to eliminate its causes. The ‘temptations’, as Mitterrand called them, of independence and secession had to be ruled out because they would remove ‘the only chance France still has to remain a world power: a Franco-African ensemble stretching from the North Sea to the Congo’.

  None of them realised that they were witnessing the beginning of a war which would mark France for generations to come.fn2

  In November 1954, Mitterrand drafted a programme of economic and social reforms designed to give ‘equal chances for all who are born on Algerian soil, regardless of their origin’, accompanied by increased investment in the territory’s infrastructure, a rise in the minimum wage and measures to redistribute arable land to Arab villagers. The settlers were not pleased. The word ‘reform’, one of their leaders commented, is ‘inelegant and inopportune. It gives the impression of a promise, when the task today is to restore law and order.’

  Six weeks later, on January 5 1955, the Cabinet discussed measures to extend Arab voting rights, and a new proposal to merge the metropolitan and territorial police forces, in order, as Mitterrand put it, to prevent the ‘independence of the latter being compromised’; in other words, to stop the police being used as an instrument to maintain the settlers’ monopoly of power.7

  No decision was taken on voting rights. But the proposal to amalgamate the police was approved. Henri Borgeaud warned Mendès that if it went ahead, he and his allies would bring down the government. In parliament, Mitterrand was accused of sowing the seeds of division. Algerians, he was told, were ‘not bothered about political rights’, their only interest was ‘bread and housing’.

  Borgeaud was as good as his word and, the following month, the government fell. Even without the ultras’ opposition, there was no majority in parliament for change. Mitterrand himself was reluctant to go beyond the prevailing consensus. He told the UDSR that summer that he was personally ‘very conservative and very hostile’ towards those who wished to sever the links between France and its overseas possessions. Some degree of autonomy would be needed, he acknowledged, because ‘you cannot stop these children we are training, who aspire to take charge . . . from having this responsibility. [Otherwise] you will set them against you, the more so because now they . . . read the papers, they come to Paris, they know how the world works.’ But those who advocated full self-government were ‘partisans of abandonment’. A paternalistic nineteenth-century empire-builder would not have put it differently.

  The best answer, Mitterrand believed, was for Algeria to be integrated with metropolitan France. If that proved impossible, France and its overseas possessions should be brought together in a federal state.

  Mitterrand’s orthodoxy mirrored the immobilism of the Fourth Republic. Only in the most exceptional circumstances, such as those which brought Mendès France to power with a mandate to end the war in Indochina, was a government able to break the mould and act decisively. The rest of the time was spent in a game of musical chairs, where the same establishment figures changed ministries and, in different combinations, formed governments whose policies were virtually indistinguishable because they were all tributary to the same parliamentary base. To be accepted in this system, a politician should not make waves. Mitterrand’s goal was to head the government.8 He had bragged to friends some years earlier: ‘any fool can be Prime Minister at 50. I will do it at 40!’ As Interior Minister, the third-ranking post in the Cabinet, within striking distance of the top job, he would take great care to do nothing which might rock the boat, even if that meant keeping silent about policies which in other circumstances he would have denounced as barbarous.

  The use of torture was a case in point.

  Mitterrand knew that torture was routinely practised by the police not only in Algeria but in a
ll the French North African territories. Four years earlier, the former Resistance leader, Claude Bourdet, had asked in the left-wing weekly, France Observateur, ‘Is there a Gestapo in Algeria?’ After the FLN launched the insurrection in November, Mitterrand issued a directive, reminding the police in Algeria that there must be no repetition of ‘the errors that have occurred in the past’ towards ‘Muslim French citizens’. It was hardly robust, and became still less so when buried out of sight in a confidential circular.

  Speaking publicly in parliament a few days later, a Christian Democrat MP, Jacques Fonlupt-Esperaber, also a former member of the Resistance, was more courageous. ‘To affront the dignity of the human person, even the smallest among us, no matter what his origin or religion,’ he said, ‘is an outrage against all and, in truth, the most dreadful of threats to France’s future in Algeria as elsewhere.’ He was heard out in silence and, at the next elections, was not selected as a candidate.fn3 But the problem did not go away. On January 13 1955, France Observateur published another article by Bourdet, all the more poignant because the practices he described were those he had experienced himself at the hands of the Nazis:

  The torture known as la baignoire [a form of water-boarding], the pumping of water into the anus, the use of electric shocks to the mucous membranes, the armpits or the spine, are the preferred methods because if they are ‘carried out well’ they leave no visible trace. This explains why the torturers do not present their prisoners before a judge until five to ten days after their arrest . . . Once these Gestapists have dictated to their half-dead victim the ‘confession’ they are pleased to make him sign, the rest of his stay with the police is spent getting him back into a fit state, even, if necessary, giving him [medical] treatment – Yes! They do that – so that he will be presentable when brought before the judge.9