by Philip Short
‘Mitterrand is both angel and demon,’ Jacques Duhamel, later a Gaullist minister, told a journalist. ‘Since a tender age, [he] has played two roles at once.’ When, in the last months of his life, Mitterrand told Georges-Marc Benamou that he had felt ‘ill at ease’ in the Fourth Republic, it was this period that he had in mind.
That autumn an event occurred which would have profound implications for Algeria, for the Middle East and for the whole of the Western world.
On October 29 1956, Israel invaded the Sinai peninsula. A week later, British and French paratroops took Port Said. After another week they were within hours of winning control of the whole of the Suez Canal Zone. At which point, under intense pressure from President Eisenhower and the Soviet Head of State, Nikolai Bulganin, the British and French governments were forced to call a ceasefire.
The Suez fiasco, as it became known, had immense consequences.
Britain and France lost for ever their dominant role in the Middle East. The US took the first steps towards a special security relationship with Israel, which until then it had kept at arm’s length. Guy Mollet launched the French nuclear weapons programme, convinced that it was the only way for France to remain a major power; and, while he was at it, to thank Israel for its support in the ill-fated expedition, he agreed to help the Jewish State acquire nuclear weapons. The French army, already smarting from the abandonment of Indochina and now finding itself pulled up short on the verge of military victory in Egypt, lost confidence in the political authorities.
A putsch was smouldering. In December, General Jacques Faure, the deputy commandant in Algiers, who had close ties to the extreme Right, began gathering support for a military coup. The plot was discovered and those involved received a slap on the wrist. But it would only be a matter of time before it would happen again.
For Guy Mollet, the Suez disaster was a second Munich, a capitulation not to Hitler but to the hegemony of America and Russia. For the rest of his term in office, he ignored the war in Algeria, concentrating instead on Europe, where the following spring the six founding members of the European Economic Community – France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries – signed the Treaty of Rome.
The result was that, after Suez, the French army in Algeria had free rein.
That winter Jean Mairey submitted another devastating report on military violence against the Arab population. Bourgès-Maunoury fired him and gave instructions that he be forbidden to enter Algeria again. The following month, January 1957, after the assassination by the FLN of one of the leaders of the ultras, Lacoste placed Algiers under military rule.
General Jacques Massu’s paratroops were charged with restoring order, which they did with their customary vigour. Twenty thousand Arabs were rounded up and placed in internment camps. Interrogation centres, no longer ‘laboratories’, practised torture on an industrial scale. Thousands who succumbed during questioning, or were ‘too damaged, . . . no longer in a state where they could be shown’, were thrown into the sea, weighted down with concrete. The Bay of Algiers became a marine cemetery. Bodies washed ashore were known as ‘Bigeard’s shrimps’, after the French colonel whose paratroop unit distinguished itself in such operations. The repression brought a brief respite, but drove most of the capital’s Arab population into the arms of the rebels.
For Mitterrand, Suez was a sign that the government’s days were numbered.
In a speech to the UDSR, he accepted for the first time that Algeria might be granted internal self-government, but only if, unlike in Tunisia and Morocco, ‘we are sure it will go no further’ and the territory would remain part of France.17 In private he no longer ruled out independence as a long-term possibility. Within the Cabinet, he joined Gaston Defferre, the Socialist Minister of Overseas Territories, and his old ally, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the Minister of State, in calling for a fundamental change of policy. The government, he said, should proclaim an unconditional ceasefire and resume negotiations.
Mollet was unmoved. ‘We are all in the same boat,’ the Prime Minister told them. The policy would not be changed.
Two months later, in March, Mitterrand wrote to Mollet to protest that ‘out of 900 persons arrested by the paratroops, only 39 have been presented in court. [The judiciary] is in total ignorance of the fate of the others.’ Lacoste was furious. ‘Your prosecutor-general knows nothing!’ he raged back. ‘It’s not 900 who have disappeared but 3,000!’ That proves, Mitterrand retorted, ‘that Mr Reliquet is not given to exaggeration.’ The following week, he blocked a proposal to extend the power of the military tribunals. On that occasion, for the first time in an official letter from one minister to another, the word ‘torture’ was employed. ‘You are not unaware,’ he wrote to Bourgès-Maunoury, ‘of the cases of torture of which certain military units have been guilty and for which they should be brought to account before a judge.’ The Defence Minister was livid. To say that he was ‘aware’ of such things, and was doing nothing about them, amounted to accusing him of complicity.18
But it was all far too little, too late. Mitterrand had known for years that the law was being trampled underfoot in Algeria. To start putting down markers in the spring of 1957, and even then only within the government, was totally unconvincing.19 In parliament, before the Justice Commission, in April, he finally acknowledged for the first time in public that there had been ‘cases of physical abuse . . . and an increase in arbitrary detentions’. But, given the scale of the abuse, it was a very feeble admission. These ‘regrettable facts’, he assured his listeners, were far less frequent than the newspapers claimed, ‘although more than there should be’.
Mitterrand’s refusal to take a moral stand proved not only weak but misguided. When, at long last, in May 1957, after sixteen months in power – a record of longevity in the Fourth Republic – Mollet’s government fell, Coty called on his rival, Bourgès-Maunoury, to form the new government.20 Despite their political differences, Bourgès asked Mitterrand to stay on as Justice Minister. He declined. If Mollet had been unable to bring peace to Algeria, his successor was unlikely to do better.21
In the next four months, France had three governments. Bourgès-Maunoury lasted until the end of September. He was succeeded by Antoine Pinay, whose administration survived one day, followed by Guy Mollet, who remained in office for less than a week.
At that point, Mitterrand felt once again that he had a real chance of being nominated as Prime Minister. Instead, in November 1957, Coty named Félix Gaillard, a brilliant young economist in the Radical Party who, the day after his 38th birthday, became the youngest head of the French government since Napoleon. Mitterrand knew and appreciated Gaillard. ‘I often had the impression,’ he said (many years later, after Gaillard had been killed in a yachting accident), ‘that he was more intelligent than I was, that he thought faster than I did, that he was more seductive to women. In some ways, he gave me a complex. But he lacked perseverance.’ Mitterrand proved as much, one blazing hot summer’s day, when he and Gaillard played tennis at the home of a relative of a young left-wing lawyer named Robert Badinter. ‘Félix Gaillard was much better, more talented, stronger, more skilful,’ Badinter remembered. ‘Yet to everyone’s surprise, Mitterrand was the winner. He was much more determined. He wore him down, in three and a half hours.’ Mitterrand confessed later to Badinter that, after ‘that stupid tennis match’, it took him two months to recover. But that was not the point. What mattered was that he had won.
Gaillard’s government survived five months and, like Bourgès-Maunoury’s before it, was brought down by events in Algeria. His fall, on April 16, finally opened the way for Mitterrand’s nomination.
René Coty first summoned the Christian Democrat, Georges Bidault, who failed to obtain the backing even of his own party. Then he called Mitterrand. ‘He asked me: “Will you accept the votes of the Communists?”’, Mitterrand recounted. ‘I replied: “Of course. And if that’s not enough, I will ask for them.” Coty responded: “In that case it’s impossibl
e.”’22 The story was plainly untrue. With one exception – that of Pierre Mendès France – every government in the Fourth Republic had accepted the votes of Communist MPs. It was no more a problem for Coty than for anyone else. That Mitterrand should make such a claim many years later, at a time when he wished to pretend that he had always favoured an alliance with the Communist Party, was understandable. But that was not what had caused Coty to refuse him his chance. For some reason, Mitterrand acknowledged in a letter next day to his friend, Henri Friol, who was Coty’s Chief of Staff, the President did not trust him.23 He never worked out why. It might have stemmed from the ‘Leaks Affair’, when Coty had sided with his accusers. It might even have been – irony of ironies! – that his performance as Justice Minister had aroused the old man’s contempt. Whatever the root cause, after sounding out Pleven, who, like Bidault, was unable to muster sufficient support, the President finally named a Christian Democrat, Pierre Pflimlin, who was sworn in on May 14.
Coty claimed afterwards that he had expected Pflimlin’s government to fall quickly. Had that happened, he told a colleague, ‘I would have called on François Mitterrand, whose statesmanlike qualities I have often appreciated.’24 That was also untrue. Two weeks later, when Mitterrand met the President again at the head of a UDSR delegation, Coty’s remarks were surreal:25
The President [said to me] in a paternal tone: ‘I would very well have called you, Mr Mitterrand. I recognise your abilities and I appreciate your courage. But if I had given you the mission to form a government, given your reputation down there, it would have risked causing troubles in Algiers . . .’ Troubles in Algiers! The least one could say at the end of May 1958 was that the troubles were already there. The problem wasn’t making them, but bringing them to an end.
If Mitterrand’s reputation in Algeria ruled him out as a potential Prime Minister, why had Coty said that if Pflimlin fell, he would have named him? Behind the polite dissimulation, Coty was plainly determined that, on his watch, Mitterrand’s name would not go forward.26 The UDSR leader had held almost a dozen ministerial posts, including two of the top three in the Cabinet. Coty had designated others who were younger and far less experienced.27 To Mitterrand, however, he never offered that chance. His dream of becoming Prime Minister was not only unfulfilled. With Coty it had been vain from the outset.28
Edgar Faure, with his usual verve, summed up the challenge the government faced. ‘The Algerian problem,’ he said, ‘is a problem in the fourth dimension, and there is only one man in France who can move about up there.’ Shortly after meeting Mitterrand, the President invited the man of the fourth dimension to come to the Elysée. After twelve years in the wilderness, General de Gaulle was back. The following day he was sworn in as the 25th and last Prime Minister of the Fourth Republic.
Since early spring, the possibility of the General’s return had been on everybody’s lips.29 In March, tens of thousands of posters had appeared in towns all over France, urging: ‘Let us call de Gaulle!’ At the beginning of May, René Coty despatched an emissary to the General’s home at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, asking what his attitude would be if the country asked him to return. Four days later, de Gaulle sent a noncommittal reply. But in private he made clear that he would ‘face up to his responsibilities and take over the reins of the nation’ if the situation required it.
On May 13, a Tuesday, a demonstration was called in Algiers to mourn three French soldiers who had been taken prisoner and executed by the FLN. The government was confident that it had the situation in hand. When a colleague arrived from Algiers to warn Pflimlin that the army was on the brink of revolt, the Prime Minister replied: ‘All that’s police fiction, my dear friend . . . You’ve been too long in the sun.’
But under the sun, the earth was moving.
That afternoon, the demonstration spun out of control. While the police stood by, tens of thousands of settlers rampaged through the Governor-General’s Office, smashing furniture, tearing doors from their hinges and throwing equipment and files out of the windows. To restore calm, the paratroop commander, General Massu, agreed, at the rioters’ demand, to lead a Committee of Public Safety to uphold French rule, with Léon Delbecque as his deputy. Delbecque, a leading ultra, had just arrived from Paris, where he had been working secretly with sympathisers on the army’s General Staff to prepare to place the French capital under military rule to await de Gaulle’s return. Algiers was in a state of insurrection and there was every reason to think that, if it continued, the troubles would spread to France itself.
Mitterrand was at the National Assembly for the debate on Pflimlin’s investiture when news of these events reached Paris.
The government was paralysed. That night there were calls, each more improbable than the last, for troops to be ordered to open fire on the rioters; for de Gaulle and his staff to be arrested; for the General to be drugged and compelled to issue a statement condemning the revolt. In the early hours of the morning, Pflimlin was sworn in. Fifteen minutes later, speaking from the balcony of the Governor-General’s Office, Massu appealed to de Gaulle ‘to set up a Government of National Salvation which alone can save Algeria’. A Cabinet meeting at 4.30 a.m. broke up without taking any decision.
Two days later the army commander, General Salan, threw his weight behind the rebels, declaring, at the end of an emotional speech to the people of Algiers: ‘Long live General de Gaulle!’ That night, in a brief statement, de Gaulle reacted publicly for the first time:
Formerly the country, in its deepest being, put its confidence in me to lead it, in its entirety, to salvation. Today, facing the trials which confront it once again, may it know that I hold myself ready to assume the powers of the Republic.30
In Algiers, there were scenes of wild enthusiasm. In Paris, the Left and Centre – Communists, Radicals, Socialists and UDSR – protested that de Gaulle had not condemned the generals’ sedition.
In fact ‘the Great Charles’ was in an invidious position. To convince the politicians, and the country as a whole, that he alone was capable of mastering the situation and restoring calm, it was necessary that the military flout the legitimate authority of the State. If he wished to regain power, he had no choice but to remain silent while sedition triumphed.31 But by doing so he opened himself to the charge that he was returning to power by a putsch. He might argue that the authority of the State had crumbled to such a degree that it no longer merited the army’s support.32 But rebellion is rebellion, no matter what it is called. In May 1958, as in June 1940, Charles de Gaulle was on the side of those who had rebelled against the lawful government.fn4
At a press conference on Monday, May 19, the first he had held for three years, the General made clear that he intended to be ‘the master of the hour’. Among those packed in to hear him at the Hôtel d’Orsay, in the cavernous nineteenth-century railway station of that name on the Left Bank of the Seine, were Graham Greene and François Mauriac’s younger brother, Jean, who was mesmerised by his performance.
‘He was triumphant,’ Jean wrote afterwards, ‘utterly certain of his return to power. Ironic, mocking, sardonic, witty. He made everyone laugh. [For two hours] he was by turns light-hearted and serious, optimistic and dramatic, with a youthfulness and verve that were riveting.’
Pflimlin and Guy Mollet listened on the radio as de Gaulle majestically dismissed the notion that he might curtail political freedoms. ‘Have I ever done so?’ he asked. ‘On the contrary, I have re-established them when they had disappeared. Do you think that at the age of 67, I am about to launch a career as a dictator?’
The contentious, and unanswerable, question of his support for the insurrection he eluded with a pirouette: the leaders in Algeria, he noted, ‘have not been the object of any disciplinary measure by the government, which has even delegated to them its authority. Why, then, do you want me – who holds no public office – to condemn them for sedition?’
For the next week, de Gaulle stood aside as the government’s unity fractured. F
irst Mollet, then Pflimlin himself, put out feelers to the General’s staff. Preparations for direct military intervention, which Léon Delbecque had initiated ten days earlier, gathered pace. ‘Operation Resurrection’ as it had been named, would involve the sending of paratroops to seize strategic points around Paris and install the General in power. Officially de Gaulle disapproved. But he was well informed about its planning, and the signals he sent out privately were sufficiently ambiguous to keep the threat alive. The weekend following his press conference, supporters of the insurrectionists, led by a far-Right MP, Pascal Arrighi, seized control in Corsica. It was a sideshow of no importance, but psychologically it raised the stakes. Next day, General Ely, who had resigned a few days earlier as Chief of the General Staff, noted in his diary: ‘The risk of civil war is growing.’ From then on, the Prime Minister slept in a different place each night. Only de Gaulle was unperturbed, instructing Georges Pompidou, who had worked with him since the 1940s, to start preparing the speech he would make on his accession to power.
Was ‘Resurrection’ a real possibility? The military and the political authorities thought so. To de Gaulle, it was a means of exerting pressure on the government to transfer power peacefully. Would he have let it go ahead if all else had failed? The balance of evidence suggests that he would. Certainly he kept the option open until the last possible moment. If it did not happen, it was because, in the end, he found he did not need it.33
At 4 a.m. on May 29, Pflimlin resigned. President Coty appealed to ‘the most illustrious of Frenchmen’ to form a Government of National Salvation to bring the country back from ‘the brink of civil war’, a proposition which the General graciously accepted.