Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  Two days later François Mauriac added his voice with a stinging denunciation of police methods published in l’Express. Mendès promised an inquiry. A confidential report, submitted to the government six weeks later, listed in ghastly detail the methods the police were using, but concluded they were unavoidable and that, in difficult circumstances, the police were doing a good job. Mitterrand’s opinion seems to have been little different. When a lawyer in Algiers protested that the clients she was defending had been tortured, he told her politely she must be mistaken.

  In the last days of Mendès’s government, an Algerian Muslim MP, after detailing the tortures to which his compatriots were subjected, told parliament, ‘I can tell you that my co-religionists in the villages who do not speak a word of French now know what electricity is. Do you believe that sowing all this hatred is going to help any of us?’ Mitterrand interjected that the only way to end these ‘unfortunate habits’ was to change the make-up of the police force, which the government was doing. The MP was not convinced. ‘Without urgent reforms,’ he told the assembly, ‘you are opening the way to blood and tears.’

  In December 1955, Edgar Faure, who had succeeded Mendès France, called a snap parliamentary election. The campaign turned out to be agitated. France had become prosperous in the ten years since the end of the war. But people viewed that as the fruit of their own efforts, achieved not thanks to the government but despite it. The political class as a whole was the object of growing contempt, blamed for instability at home and declining prestige abroad.

  A new political force had sprung up to exploit this disaffection: the far right-wing Poujadist party, which had been founded to give voice to small shopkeepers and self-employed artisans. It quickly became a magnet for malcontents of all stripes – of which France, in the mid-1950s, was not in short supply – especially among the young. Its leader, Pierre Poujade, the proprietor of a stationery shop in a small town in south-western France, had begun his political career by organising a tax revolt. He was flamboyant, charismatic and within two years found himself at the head of a vociferous national movement. The Poujadists’ slogans were ‘Unite or croak!’ and ‘Sortez les sortants!’, which meant ‘Kick the bums out!’

  The Poujadists practised systematic disruption, which made good political sense at a time when two out of three French citizens told pollsters that parliament disgusted them.

  Favourite Poujadist tactics included ‘bombarding with projectiles (tomatoes, fruit, trays of vegetables, empty bottles, etc.); cutting off electricity at meetings; taking candidates hostage; locking the doors of meeting halls; vandalism; and thuggery’. In the Charente, the harassment became so bad that a leading Radical, Félix Gaillard, was forced to cancel all his meetings for the last week of the campaign. In the Nièvre, Mitterrand was honoured by a visit from Poujade himself, whose wife, Yvette, screamed at him: ‘MPs like you should be hanged . . . Your sort should be crushed like slugs.’ Almost all his meetings were disrupted by fist fights, provoked by Poujadist supporters, and at the small town of Lucenay, in the Morvan, on December 14, he was hit on the head by a flying bottle.

  Backed by the same Centre-Right coalition which had brought him victory in 1946 and 1951, Mitterrand himself was assured of re-election. But the UDSR was struggling. Its chief ally, the Radical Party, had refused to agree a list of constituencies where each party would give way to the other to avoid splitting the vote. This was standard practice in the Fourth Republic, but Mendès, moralistic as ever, had rejected it as horse-trading.

  Fearing a mediocre result in his first election as party leader, Mitterrand had campaigned round the clock. On Christmas Day, the last Sunday before the vote, he collapsed in the middle of his speech. He had been hoping that if the UDSR did well, he might be invited to form the next government. He said later that it had not been due to any physical ailment, but sheer frustration at seeing that prize slip from his grasp.10

  When the votes were counted, the outcome was as bad as Mitterrand had feared. The UDSR obtained six seats, half as many as in the outgoing parliament, and was able to form a parliamentary group only with the affiliation of the thirteen African MPs in Houphouet-Boigny’s RDA. The Communists, with 25 per cent of the vote and 150 seats, emerged as the strongest party. The Poujadists, at the other end of the political spectrum, won 51 seats (of which 11 were later invalidated). In the mainstream the Socialists, the Christian Democrats and the traditional Right were level-pegging with roughly 90 seats each.

  As Mitterrand had anticipated, Mendès’s refusal to cut a deal had left the Radicals with substantially fewer seats than before. First Edgar Faure, then Mendès, declined Coty’s invitation to try to form a government.

  On February 1 1956, after a four-week hiatus, Guy Mollet was sworn in as the first Socialist Prime Minister for eight years. The previous week Mitterrand had presided over a meeting of the UDSR Executive Committee at which Mendès had been roundly condemned for causing the party’s electoral losses. They had voted to back Mollet. Mitterrand endorsed the decision, not from pique at Mendès’s refusal to play the parliamentary game, nor even from resentment at his conduct in the ‘Leaks Affair’, eighteen months earlier, which he did not and would not forget, but from calculations of his own interest. He was convinced that a Socialist-led administration would not last for more than a few months and that, when it fell, President Coty would be obliged to ask him to form the next government.

  With parliament so finely divided, the Socialists needed all the support they could get. In return for the UDSR’s backing, Mollet offered Mitterrand the post of Justice Minister, or ‘Guardian of the Seals’, second only to the Prime Minister in the government hierarchy.11

  Mollet took office determined to bring peace to Algeria. During the campaign he had written that voters faced a choice ‘between reconciliation . . . and an imbecile war with no end’. He had laid out his programme shortly before his investiture: neither withdrawal nor blind repression, but the maintenance of French rule; the introduction of a single electoral college for Europeans and Arabs; and social and economic reforms to reduce inequalities between the two communities.

  To launch the new policy with a striking gesture, he planned a surprise visit to Algiers, like that which Mendès France had made to Tunis, eighteen months earlier. But news of the trip leaked out and the police sent back ominous reports that the settlers were mobilising for massive anti-government protests.

  The ultras were up in arms because Mollet had decided to replace Jacques Soustelle, a dissident Gaullist whom Mendès had appointed as Governor-General of Algeria, with a veteran army officer, General Georges Catroux, who would hold Cabinet rank. Soustelle had initially been deeply unpopular. But gradually his insistence that Algeria must remain an integral part of France, his reluctant acceptance of ‘enhanced interrogations’ and his decision to authorise collective reprisals against Arab villages which supported the FLN – a chilling echo of Nazi practices during the Occupation – won the Europeans’ support. When, on February 2, Soustelle was recalled to Paris, tens of thousands of settlers organised emotional demonstrations in Algiers and other cities, demanding that he remain.

  It would have been difficult to find a worse moment for a newly elected Prime Minister to venture into the Algerian minefield. Mitterrand and Mendès, who had been named Minister of State, both urged him to postpone the visit. He refused.

  As soon as Mollet landed in Algiers on the afternoon of February 6, he realised his mistake. The entire 12-mile length of the drive from the airport into the centre of the city was lined on both sides with soldiers and police at 10-yard intervals. The schools, the shops and the factories were shuttered and deserted, many of them draped in black. In the central square, before the Governor-General’s Office, 50,000 people had gathered. When the Prime Minister and his delegation arrived to lay a wreath at the war memorial, the crowd erupted. They hurled clods of earth, paving stones, pebbles, metal bolts, fruit, vege-tables and even tear-gas grenades, distributed by sym
pathetic police officers. His police escort managed to get him away to the Summer Palace, the Governor-General’s official residence. The crowd followed and tried to storm the building. Jean Mairey, who, after working with Mitterrand at the Interior Ministry, had been transferred to become Chief of Security in Algiers, ordered machine-guns with live ammunition to be set up, aimed at the rioters. ‘I couldn’t let the Prime Minister . . . be killed,’ he explained later. ‘I wasn’t happy about it, but that was the point we had reached.’

  In the event, salvation came from General Catroux, who had remained in Paris. With Mollet besieged inside the Palace, he decided that the only course open to him was to step down. It was the news the crowd had been hoping for. Their objective attained, the demonstrators dispersed.

  The effects of the rioting, and of Mollet’s humiliation, became clear over the next few months. The settlers had proved to themselves that if they were sufficiently determined, they could force the government in Paris to back off. By failing to use force against European rioters, when Arab protests were always put down with bloodshed, the government had acquiesced in a double standard: for all the talk of equality, there was one set of rules for Whites, another for Muslims. Guy Mollet might insist that the only model for Algeria was ‘a ceasefire, followed by [new] elections, followed by negotiations’, and that force was not an answer unless accompanied by reforms, but in practice the restoration of order became the government’s sole priority.

  With hindsight it is clear that Algeria had passed the point of no return many months before. But at the time, as Mollet’s predecessor, Edgar Faure, acknowledged, with notable understatement, even ‘the most lucid [of us] lacked clear-sightedness’.

  While Faure was Prime Minister, in August 1955, seventy-one European men, women, children and infants had been slaughtered by the FLN at the port of Philippeville (now Skikda), on the north-eastern coast, in response to Soustelle’s policy of collective reprisals. In the days that followed, the army executed more than a thousand Arabs, most of them ordinary townsfolk who were rounded up, taken to the town stadium and shot.12 Extremists among the settlers, some of them former members of the Resistance, others supporters of Vichy, created terrorist groups on the model of the ‘Red Hand’ in Tunisia and the ‘White Hand’ in Morocco.

  The Interior Minister, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, told parliament: ‘How can one avoid – I do not excuse; I am just trying to explain – men who have seen their whole family with their throats cut losing their reason for a few minutes?’

  By the time Mollet took office, twenty French citizens, both Arab and European, were being murdered every day. Officially sixteen rebels were killed daily, but the true figure was many times higher. Captured rebels were often tortured for information and then executed, which meant they did not figure in the government statistics.

  In a secret report to the government, Jean Mairey compared the French army to the SS and his own police force to the Gestapo.

  On February 15 1956, the Cabinet agreed in principle that the government should take ‘exceptional, “dictatorial” powers’ to resolve the Algerian problem. The minutes of the discussion show Mitterrand among the ministers favouring a hard line. The following month parliament approved legislation allowing the army to undertake police duties and substituting military tribunals for the civilian courts, even in cases entailing the death penalty. As Interior Minister, eighteen months earlier, Mitterrand had rejected a similar proposal. Now he signed off on it, together with Mollet; the new Algerian Governor-General, Robert Lacoste; and Bourgès-Maunoury, who had been appointed Defence Minister.13

  Soon afterwards Mendès-France resigned. By ‘ignoring the feelings and the misery of the indigenous population’, he said, Mollet risked the loss not only of Algeria but of the whole of French Africa. Late in life, Mitterrand acknowledged that at that point he should have resigned too.

  In June, the Cabinet discussed expediting the execution of Algerian prisoners who had been sentenced to death. Once again Mitterrand was in favour.

  Over the next twelve months, forty-four Arabs and one European, a nationalist sympathiser, were sent to the guillotine. Each case was reviewed by the Supreme Council of the Magistracy, which made recommendations to President Coty, who then chose whether or not to commute the sentence. In at least thirty-two cases – some of the records are missing – Mitterrand, who, as Justice Minister, was Vice-President of the Council, recommended that the sentences be carried out. Jean-Claude Périer, a lawyer who also sat on the Council, remembered:

  He already had a well-established reputation for authoritarianism when he took up his post and he made that felt. He was feared . . . [He] did not hide the fact that we were at war in Algeria and that, in his view, Justice was the means through which the State made its authority clear . . . Anything opposed to the authority of France must be pursued and punished. In war, you give no quarter . . . [His approach] was really very repressive. One can’t deny that. But that was his vision of Algeria. He thought it was the best solution . . . There were two men in Mitterrand, the Justice Minister: first, a man who was open to all the questions of individual freedoms, and at the same time – which is quite paradoxical – a fighter, almost a man of war, in everything concerning government action. Open to liberties, but in favour of tough public action. That may seem contradictory, but with him everything was contradictory, and at the same time in harmony.14

  Mitterrand adopted a similar attitude to the use of torture, which, as the situation deteriorated, was becoming more and more widespread. The government, at the highest levels, was well aware of what was being done. Périer remembered photographs, in the dossiers submitted to the Supreme Council, ‘showing the corpses of victims on which tortures had been carried out that were beyond anything you could even imagine. It was unbearable.’ The newspaper, Le Monde, wrote of the existence of ‘veritable laboratories of torture’ throughout Algeria, concluding ominously: ‘One cannot defend a noble cause by foul means.’

  The situation grew worse with every passing month.

  The FLN ordered indiscriminate killing of European adults in Algiers and other cities. Foreign Legionnaires sent to relieve a company of their comrades in the Aurès Mountains found instead sixty mutilated corpses with their genitals stuffed into their mouths. Parts of the French army descended into barbarism, killing every Arab in their path. The conflict plumbed depths of savagery unknown in colonial wars elsewhere.

  All this Mitterrand knew. He had his own informants in Algiers, among them the Prosecutor-General, Jean Reliquet, who sent him regular briefings.

  Others, emulating Mendès France, resigned in protest. In October 1956, when the military forced down a plane with Ben Bella and three other FLN leaders aboard, the minister responsible for Moroccan and Tunisian Affairs, Alain Savary, a Socialist, quit the government. Not only had the army acted without Cabinet authorisation and in violation of international law, but the operation upended secret talks that were taking place with the rebels to try to achieve a ceasefire. Realistically the talks had no chance of success; but the action made continued contacts impossible. Asked by a journalist why he had not followed Savary’s lead, Mitterrand replied weakly: ‘One can’t keep resigning all the time.’

  That he believed that Algeria must remain French; that tough measures, no matter how regrettable, were necessary to achieve that; that the war, no matter how terrible, was a stage which the two countries had to pass through before peace could be achieved within some kind of Federation – all that was plausible. But it did not explain the limpet-like tenacity with which he clung to his post.

  It did not explain, either, why he kept silent in April when Claude Bourdet was arrested for an article which the Defence Minister, Bourgès-Maunoury, claimed had ‘damaged army morale’. It was the first time since the Nazi Occupation that a French journalist had been imprisoned for what he had written. Mendès France, then still a minister, immediately protested. Mollet, who saw at once the stupidity of what had been done, o
rdered his immediate release. But Mitterrand, who, as Justice Minister, was most directly involved, said nothing.15

  Nor did it explain why he went out of his way to reassure an influential group of right-wing politicians – including Jacques Soustelle; the Gaullist senator, Michel Debré; and an up-and-coming young MP named Valéry Giscard d’Estaing – that they had nothing to fear from investigations into a bazooka attack on the office of the army commander in Algiers, General Raoul Salan, undertaken on the orders of a mysterious ‘Committee of Six’ of which they were alleged to be members.

  The only explanation which covered everything he did that year – including his acquiescence in torture and his approval of military courts which he had rejected less than two years before – was that he had decided to subordinate all his actions to the overriding goal of becoming the next Prime Minister.

  Opposing Bourgès, an influential colleague, was not a good idea if you were seeking to become head of government. On the other hand, having right-wingers in your debt, as well as allies in the Centre and on the Left, might be extremely helpful.

  Only Mitterrand himself could have said exactly what was going on in his head during those twelve months. But the obstinacy with which he stuck to his strategy, even after it had become clear that Mollet’s policies would fail and the whole concept of French Algeria was misconceived, was in character. Once he had decided something – in this case to hang on in government in the belief that it would pave the way for him to reach the highest post – he refused to let go even after it had become obvious that the gamble was lost. By the winter of 1956, he began to see that himself. His Chief of Staff, Pierre Nicolay, remembered that he became ‘taciturn and irascible . . . You couldn’t approach him any more . . . He became distant, totally silent.’16 In Mollet’s government, even hardliners like Bourgès and Robert Lacoste came out looking better. At least they knew what they believed in and were straightforward about it. Mitterrand seemed to believe in nothing except his own advancement.