For every resistance fighter guillotined, a hundred Frenchmen will be slaughtered indiscriminately.
FLN, June 1956
On 18 May 1956 a platoon of twenty-one French reservists was on a routine patrol in the rugged countryside near Palestro, fifty miles south-east of Algiers. After passing through the village of Djerrah and entering one of the area’s steep, wild gorges, the unit was ambushed by a group of FLN militants commanded by Ali Khodja – a charismatic figure who had deserted from the French army in 1955. Within minutes, seventeen soldiers had been killed – most shot at close range – and four taken prisoner. When the patrol failed to return to base that evening, the alarm was raised and a search party despatched. On reaching the site of the ambush they made their grim discovery: at least two of the corpses had been mutilated – the testicles cut off and the disembowelled bodies stuffed with stones.1 In response, General Jacques Massu, commander of the 10th Parachute Division, sent seven battalions, together with several helicopters, to find the missing soldiers and hunt down those responsible. In subsequent clashes more than a dozen rebels were killed, as well as fifty Muslim villagers. Hundreds more were arrested. Khodja, though, managed to evade justice. Of the four missing conscripts, one was rescued and one cut down by ‘friendly fire’; the bodies of the other two were never found.2
The violence that occurred in and around Palestro that spring day was not particularly remarkable.3 By this stage in the conflict, terrorism, sabotage and murder were occurring on a daily basis. On 6 May, for instance, the following were reported:
In Algiers three Moslems shot dead, French policeman wounded, and bomb thrown in hospital.
16 soldiers killed, 14 wounded, and 9 missing in two rebel ambushes near Sabdou, Oran Department; 40 rebels killed in military counter-attack.
5 Cars burnt by rebels, 4 passengers kidnapped.
20 rebels killed at Gesto, near Tunisian border.
International train derailed by terrorists near Oran – no injuries.4
Over the next few days, dozens of farms were attacked, thousands of vines and fruit trees destroyed, more than forty military posts targeted and sixty civilians killed (seventeen of them French).5
Thanks to the sensationalist coverage of the rescue mission, however, the Palestro massacre was transformed into a cause célèbre, outraging French public opinion and driving the authorities to adopt ever tougher countermeasures. The loss of the platoon certainly helped to bring home both the scale and the horror of the war – it was the French army’s biggest single loss of life thus far, and the young reservists, who had been in Algeria for barely two weeks, were almost all family men from suburban Paris. The brutal manner of their deaths and the appalling defilement of their bodies were shocking.6 The incident also occurred at a particularly sensitive time, with opinion polls showing that 63 per cent of the French public now believed that Algeria was the nation’s ‘most important problem’ (up from just 25 per cent at the turn of the year), and significant anti-war sentiment bubbling to the surface.7 On the very day that the young soldiers lost their lives, two thousand people had gathered in Grenoble to block a train that they believed was carrying reservists bound for Algeria (it was in fact packed with commuters). When the police fired tear gas to clear the tracks they were met by a hail of bricks and stones. Ninety people, including sixty policemen, were injured in the clashes, with twenty-three arrested.8 Ominously, disgruntled reservists were in the vanguard of anti-war protest: denouncing Mollet and other senior politicians, calling for ‘peace’, confronting the police and flouting military discipline.9 Criticism also came from influential writers and intellectuals. In an editorial for L’Observateur, for example, Claude Bourdet warned that a hundred thousand young Frenchmen were threatened with ‘being thrown into the “dirty war” of Algeria, with losing the best years of their lives, perhaps with being wounded, indeed killed, for a cause few of them approve’.10 Claude Gérard – a journalist, former Resistance leader and recipient of the Légion d’Honneur – actually spent ten days with rebel forces, and afterwards spoke warmly of their cause. In an interview with the London Observer, she explained, ‘I felt I was watching the birth of a nation. I love my own country too much to blame them for loving theirs and for sacrificing their lives for it.’11 Both were soon arrested: Bourdet charged with spreading ‘demoralisation’, Gérard with attacking the ‘security of the state’.12
The French authorities now seized on Palestro as a way to encourage patriotic unity in the face of FLN ‘barbarism’. Robert Lacoste, Algeria’s new minister-resident, was clear about which ‘side was practising extermination’. The fifty-seven-year-old socialist used the outrage to crack down on the FLN, proclaiming that ‘the war we are waging . . . is that of the Western world, of civilisation against anarchy, democracy against dictatorship.’13 Lacoste, who had served with distinction in both the Great War and the French Resistance, possessed a ‘bullish, no-nonsense’ temperament.14 Although committed to reforming Algeria – with the ultimate aim of creating a new, Franco-Muslim society rooted in the values of tolerance, mutual respect and political equality – Lacoste, like most of his colleagues, was convinced that first the FLN ‘extremists’ had to be defeated.15 But this approach failed to recognise either the overwhelming preference of Algeria’s Muslims for a fully independent Arab state or the settlers’ stubborn refusal to countenance any compromise.16 French efforts to win over Muslim ‘hearts and minds’ were also undermined by the FLN’s determination to bear down on any Muslim who advocated co-operation. In early summer, for example, a band of FLN fighters infiltrated the town of Saint Lucien in the Kabylia, on Algeria’s northern coast, where sixteen Muslim farmers had recently agreed to participate in a French programme of land redistribution. By the time they left, four of the farmers were dead, the other twelve had withdrawn their co-operation and the government project lay in ruins.17 But it was the increasingly harsh counter-terrorism measures, adopted in the attempt to pacify the country, which ultimately doomed efforts to find a liberal ‘solution’ to the Algerian question.18
By the end of the spring France was involved in a full-scale war, with 350,000 troops ranged against some twenty thousand FLN fighters. At $1.7 million a day (the equivalent of $14 million today), the cost was eye-wateringly high – in part because the attempt to pacify Algeria relied on the resource-intensive strategy of ‘quadrillage’.19 Under this system small fortified posts, sometimes garrisoned by as few as ten men, were placed at every key point in a given area – villages, agricultural centres, major road junctions and commanding features – typically at distances of two or three miles. Quadrillage was designed to reassure the pieds noirs that both they and their property would be protected. Meanwhile, regular patrols were mounted to ‘show the flag’, befriend the local Muslim population and show that they would be supported if they defied the FLN.20 Army units, supported by helicopters and light aircraft, launched regular attacks on FLN units, and a series of major security measures – including checkpoints in towns and on all major roads, curfew and regular ‘stop and search’ – were imposed across Algeria.21
The French army was, though, not fighting a conventional war but an insurgency. This produced a distinctive environment, where the traditional demarcation between the battle front and the home front collapsed, and where the ‘enemy’ – mobile, elusive and often invisible – could blend into the local civilian population. Reservists – usually unable to speak Arabic or Berber and unnerved by reports of previously ‘friendly’ Muslims suddenly turning on Europeans – were actively encouraged to regard every Arab as a possible rebel, and high-profile incidents of FLN savagery provoked a desire for retribution. Indeed, French soldiers often found themselves condoning, or engaging in, acts of terrible barbarity.22
Torture, for instance, was endemic. Common techniques for interrogating suspected FLN prisoners included beating their feet until they were raw, and then placing them in cold water; the forced ingestion of water (often using a hose), until both the stomach and lungs began to fill up; repeatedly forcing the head of a prisoner into a trough until they were half drowned; and applying electrodes, typically powered by a portable army signals magneto, to sensitive areas of the body (ear lobes, fingers, the mouth and, of course, the genitals).23
By the summer, word of French brutality had reached Roderick Sarell, Britain’s new consul-general in Algiers. Fifty-seven years old and a graduate of Oxford, Sarell had joined the consular service in 1936 and enjoyed a series of postings across the Middle East and North Africa. At the end of August, Sarell had a ‘distressing’ meeting with a Catholic priest, who read from letters from soldiers stationed across Algeria. Not only did the soldiers’ testimony corroborate long-standing rumours about the use of torture, they painted a deeply troubling picture of French military behaviour more generally. Sarell heard how ‘groups of farm houses in which there were suspects were mortared, and how the troops made a habit of looting the villagers’ possessions without distinction of guilt’. Another letter recounted how two young soldiers, out on patrol, had ‘come on a shepherd sitting harmlessly with his back to them. They had discussed whether to pick him off, and decided to toss up. He was unlucky and was shot.’ In another letter, an officer was quoted saying that ‘in his unit at least rape was only committed in secret’. ‘Running through the letters’, Sarell explained, ‘was a feeling of pointlessness and of disillusionment with the realities of the “pacification” campaign.’24 While recognising the difficulties that confronted the French troops, Sarell feared that such conduct would erode France’s moral status, and prove counterproductive.25
Sarell was right to be concerned. Burning down entire villages, summary executions, mass arrests, torture and looting failed to win round Arab opinion. After one particularly brutal French attack, which left several Muslim women dead, an FLN fighter proclaimed it a victory for the nationalists: ‘They hate the French a little more now. The stupid bastards are winning the war for us.’26 Yet, in their determination to pacify the country, the French persisted in turning the screw.
Just days after the Palestro massacre, for instance, some six thousand troops and fifteen hundred gendarmes raided the Casbah in Algiers, a hotbed of FLN support. Combing through its winding, densely populated streets, they arrested almost five thousand people and seized significant quantities of arms as well as FLN literature. While this complex operation was conducted with little bloodshed, it inevitably caused a good deal of distress and anger among Algerian Muslims.27 Three weeks after the raid on the Casbah, Muslim rage reached new heights. On 19 June, two FLN operatives – Ahmed Zabane and Abdelkader Ferradj – were dragged into the stone courtyard of Algiers’s imposing Barberousse prison. Each, in turn, had his hands and feet bound and his head locked into position, before the blade of the guillotine descended. It completed its grim journey with a thud that was audible inside the notoriously overcrowded jail. They were the first FLN prisoners to be executed; dozens more would follow.28
The pieds noirs had long been calling for the sentences on Zabane and Ferradj to be carried out (Zabane had killed a game-keeper, while Ferradj had participated in an ambush that claimed the lives of a European woman and a seven-year-old girl). In the bitter aftermath of Palestro, these demands reached fever pitch. Although the case of Ferradj was particularly sensitive – during his capture he had sustained injuries that had cost him an eye and left him crippled – Lacoste dismissed the appeals of the Archbishop of Algiers and others who urged clemency. But while the executions delighted most Europeans, the FLN viewed them as a declaration of war.29 In one handbill, distributed in the immediate aftermath of the executions, the FLN claimed that it had been left with no choice but to meet ‘violence with violence’ and issued a chilling threat: ‘For every resistance fighter guillotined, a hundred Frenchmen will be slaughtered indiscriminately.’30
The nationalists immediately sought to make good on their promise. By 24 June they had carried out more than twenty attacks in Algiers, killing ten and injuring dozens more. On the early evening of 20 June, for instance, a dozen or so rebels, working in pairs and armed with pistols, roamed through the Bab el Oued neighbourhood, killing three Europeans and injuring fourteen, including a teenage girl.31 The following day, Marcel Garbagnati, a twenty-year-old student, was shot dead while driving his motor scooter around the city.32 These reprisals – random and indiscriminate – pushed the city toward the abyss.
On the night of 10 August a powerful bomb, which had been planted by pied noir ultras in the heart of the Casbah, destroyed several houses on the rue de Thèbes, claiming the lives of seventy Muslims, including women and children. Six weeks later, the FLN replied in kind. Saadi Yacef – twenty-nine years old, the son of a baker, and a keen footballer – had established an extensive and elaborate FLN network in the Casbah. On the evening of 30 September, he sent three young women – Zohra Drif, Djamila Bouhired and Samia Lakhdari – on a deadly mission. Drif, a law student at the University of Algiers, was incensed by what she viewed as French intransigence and had been outraged by the executions of Zabane and Ferradj. ‘Of all the horrors of war’, she explained, this was ‘the most atrocious’. She also noted that, while Muslim citizens were subject to the indignities and inconveniences of the curfew, stop and search and other ‘counter-terrorism’ measures, ‘the European population, in its tranquil quarters . . . lived peacefully, went to the beach, to the cinema, to le dancing, and prepared for their holidays . . .’ Attractive and light-skinned, the three women removed their veils, tinted their hair and donned pretty summer dresses in order to help them pass more easily through the city’s numerous security checkpoints. They placed their 1 kg bombs, with the automatic timers set for 6:30 p.m., carefully in beach bags, covering them up with towels, sun lotion and beachwear. Lakhdari then headed to the Cafétéria on the fashionable rue Michelet. It was a favourite among European students, and several young couples were already dancing to the mambo music that blared from the jukebox. Simultaneously, Drif made for the Milk-Bar on place Bugeaud, which was packed with European families relaxing after a day at the beach. The sight of young children sipping on their milkshakes gave her pause, but she steeled herself by recalling those who had died in the rubble on the rue de Thèbes. At twenty past six, after paying her bill, she departed, leaving her bag hidden underneath a table. Minutes later, both bombs detonated. The scenes at the Milk-Bar – where the glass which covered the walls had shattered, sending large splinters across the crowded room – were particularly gruesome. The attacks left three people dead, with another fifty injured; a dozen people, including some children, had limbs amputated. The bloody toll would have been even higher if not for a faulty timer on the third device, which had been left in the waiting area at Air France’s downtown offices.33
Even as the violence spiralled out of control, some held out hope that a negotiated settlement might still be possible. Any remaining prospects for a deal were, though, firmly extinguished by the extraordinary series of events that took place on Monday 22 October.
Late that afternoon, a chartered DC-3, operated by the Moroccan airline Air Atlas, took off from a refuelling stop in Palma de Mallorca, en route from Rabat to Tunis. Aboard were four senior members of the FLN’s leadership in exile, including Ahmed Ben Bella.34 Ben Bella, born in Oran Province on Christmas Day 1918, was tall and athletic – as a young man he had been a talented footballer (he played for Olympique de Marseilles during the 1939–40 season). He was also a courageous soldier who had had ‘no qualms’ about taking up arms for the French during the Second World War, explaining that ‘her war was a just one . . . It was a fight against Fascism, and I had a good idea what Fascism meant.’ Awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1940, Ben Bella also served with distinction for the Free French and was presented with the Médal Militaire (that army’s highest honour) by none other than Charles de Gaulle. After the war Ben Bella, who had chafed against colonial rule from an early age, was drawn towards Algeria’s nationalist scene and, in 1954, was one of the ‘historic nine’ founders of the FLN. Charismatic, fearless and blessed with a razor-sharp intellect, Ben Bella became the organisation’s putative military chief and one of its most prominent figures.35
On 22 October, Ben Bella and his comrades were travelling to a summit meeting in Tunis that had, with the discreet encouragement of Paris, been convened by Morocco’s Mohammed V and Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba. The intention was to discuss proposals for Algerian independence within the framework of a North African federation – a sort of ‘Maghreb Commonwealth’ which would work to forge a co-operative relationship with France, and which would respect the rights of the European settlers.36
For the French military authorities, though, the plane’s valuable cargo presented an irresistible target.37 On hearing intelligence reports that the FLN leaders were not, as had originally been planned, travelling in the same aircraft as the Moroccan sultan, they hatched an audacious scheme. With the support of Max Lejeune, the hawkish armed forces minister – but acting without the approval, or it seems the knowledge, of Guy Mollet – they radioed the French pilot, Gaston Grellier, with orders to ‘proceed to Algiers’. Although he demurred at first, Grellier – an officer in the French reserve – was eventually won round. In order to avoid arousing suspicion as the plane changed course, he summoned the plane’s twenty-two-year-old stewardess, Claudine Lambert, and asked her to distract the passengers’ attention: ‘Be a big girl,’ he told her, ‘tonight you are entering history.’38 Thomas Brady, a New York Times correspondent who was aboard the flight, described how Lambert ‘chattered gaily with the Algerians’ and kept her cool as the plane, accompanied by a fighter escort, made its descent into Algiers, asking the passengers to ‘please fasten your seatbelts and extinguish your cigarettes. We are arriving in Tunis.’ Only after touching down, shortly after 9 p.m., was the deception revealed: the tarmac was covered with tanks, armoured cars and military personnel carrying submachine guns.39 Ben Bella was incandescent – ‘This’, he shouted, ‘is how you can trust the French!’ He then ‘jumped up, boiling with rage’ and reached for the revolver that was in his coat pocket. A comrade, placing a hand on his arm, cautioned him: ‘No, no . . . You must not give them such a beautiful excuse.’ When a gendarme appeared in the cabin, Ben Bella conceded that the game was up. In turn, the FLN leaders jumped to the tarmac, with their hands over their heads, and were promptly arrested. Charged with treason, they would spend most of the next six years in prison.40
In the European neighbourhoods of Algiers, news of le coup de l’avion was met with undisguised jubilation. One newspaper reported that strangers, swept up in a ‘wave of enthusiasm’, had been ‘accosting and congratulating each other on the streets’. There was a palpable sense that France had finally seized the initiative: as one radio commentator put it, ‘At last France has dared!’41 Alain Savary, minister for Morocco and Tunisia, resigned from the cabinet in protest and the former prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France, warned that the imprisonment of the FLN leaders was likely to prove counterproductive – ‘I have never considered these men spokesmen for Algeria’, he said, ‘but I am afraid they are going to be now.’42 It was to no avail. French public opinion was overwhelmingly supportive, which was one reason why Mollet, despite his initial fury, refused to free the prisoners.43 Reluctant to break with the military, he also believed that the ‘decapitation’ of the FLN would weaken the organisation. He was wrong. With the leading ‘external’ figures immobilised, the position of FLN hardliners in the provinces – who dismissed all talk of compromise – was strengthened immeasurably.44
It is of course impossible to know whether the planned summit in Tunis would have led to a settlement. The combination of a weak French government and an increasingly assertive faction of pied noir hardliners, together with internal divisions among the FLN, did not augur well.45 Ben Bella, though, insisted that the outlook had been ‘hopeful’ and that an agreement had been within reach before the military had intervened. By accepting the fait accompli, Mollet’s government had, he claimed, ‘buried’ any chance of peace, thereby condemning Algeria to many more years of unnecessary ‘bloodshed’ and ‘suffering’.46
The interception of the plane – a brazen violation of international law – certainly cost Paris diplomatic support. The Moroccan government condemned an ‘act of pure piracy’ and Tunisia recalled her ambassador from Paris. A general strike in Tunis saw thousands take to the streets, chanting ‘Free Ben Bella!’, while huge crowds in Casablanca waved Algerian flags and roared ‘Free Algeria!’ and ‘Lacoste to the gallows!’ Feelings ran strongly throughout the Middle East and North Africa – the governments of Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt and Libya all condemned the interception of the plane and called for the release of the FLN prisoners, while thousands took to the streets of Cairo, Tripoli and other cities, to show solidarity with the Algerian freedom struggle. At the United Nations, the Arab League and a group of twenty-four nations from Africa and Asia lodged official protests with Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld.47
Meanwhile in Washington, the Eisenhower administration – which had welcomed the diplomatic efforts to solve the Algerian crisis – was appalled. While it expressed to the French government its concerns that the incident would damage Western interests throughout the region, the administration declined to call for the prisoners’ release on the basis that it had no ‘legal right’ to intervene. In private, though, the Americans worried that the French government was veering out of control.48
The wider diplomatic and geopolitical consequences of Paris’s desire to crush the nationalist uprising in Algeria became all too apparent just days later, when France joined with Britain and Israel to deliver what they hoped would be a mortal blow to Egypt’s leader – and vocal FLN supporter – Gamal Abdel Nasser.49
Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, preaches the sermon at the Church of St John the Divine in New York City, May 17, 1956.
© Bettmann/CORBIS