The Suez Canal Zone, 31 October 1956: the one event in the calendar of decolonization when British and French resolve to fight against imperial withdrawal spectacularly and calamitously converged. ‘I cannot imagine a worse act of aggression,’ wrote India’s Premier Jawaharlal Nehru on hearing news that Egypt had been invaded by Israeli, British, and French forces: ‘the whole future of the relations between Europe and Asia hangs in the balance’.1 The invasion to which he referred was the outcome of a secret Franco-British deal with Israel, the Sèvres protocol of 24 October. One of the most infamous arrangements in the entire history of modern European empire, it concocted false pretexts to attack Egypt. The aim was to depose the country’s troublesome ruler, General Gamal Abdel Nasser, quickly, before either his armed forces or his foreign friends could do much about it.2
The protocol was agreed over three days of discussion. At its centre was a high-level Israeli negotiating team consisting of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, and Defence Ministry director Shimon Peres who met with their counterparts in Guy Mollet’s French government. The talks were held in the quiet suburban home of the Bonnier de la Chapelle family. The family’s devotion to the Resistance was exemplary, like that of the French premier, who had endured repeated arrests and Gestapo interrogation. Indeed, their eighteen-year-old son was executed for involvement in the assassination of Admiral Darlan, Vichy’s imperial plenipotentiary, in Algiers on Christmas Eve 1942. All of this endeared the Israeli visitors to their French hosts. Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, who represented British interests at Sèvres with two Foreign Office advisers, arrived later by which time the bonhomie between the French and Israelis was in full flow. A rather stiff character at the best of times, Lloyd was ill at ease in the matey, gung-ho atmosphere that pervaded the Franco-Israeli exchanges. Lloyd’s starchiness was, on this occasion, hardly surprising. All of the French and Israeli participants, even Lloyd’s opposite number, the softly-spoken Christian Pineau, a noted writer of children’s books, had at one time or another served in resistance groups, whether fighting against Nazi occupation or the British Mandate in Palestine.3 These were experiences that served them well at Sèvres where another overthrow was being plotted. It was all a far cry from Lloyd’s war service as a senior officer in the British Second Army that had pushed through north-west Europe after D-Day.4
Whatever Lloyd’s discomfort, the British government’s commitment to the deal eventually done was never in doubt. It was just that neither the Foreign Office nor the Cabinet wished to advertise the fact. Israeli forces would advance into the Sinai Desert paving the way for an Anglo-French expeditionary force to occupy the Canal Zone and ‘separate’ the warring Israeli and Egyptian armies. Ruthlessly Machiavellian, Operation Musketeer was worthy of Stalin, whose political heirs were, at the time, busy crushing a popular uprising in Budapest.5 Western democracies and NATO partners, even those with mounting imperial worries, supposedly upheld higher standards.6 Or did they? Nehru had a point. Invasion turned into fiasco in barely a week.
‘Suez’ is commonly described with favoured historians’ terms like ‘turning point’ or ‘watershed’ to describe its impact on decolonization. Anthony Eden, Britain’s ailing Prime Minister, chronically ill with liver disease after a botched operation, attracts more negative epithets. ‘Misguided’ is perhaps the kindest.7 ‘Deceitful’, ‘delusional’, or ‘criminal’ figure more often.8 Eden stepped down in January 1957, a broken man after the Eisenhower administration condemned the Suez venture and pulled the financial rug from under it.9 His career in ruins, the former premier remained unrepentant, if anything even more convinced in the aftermath of the crisis than before it that overthrowing the Cairo regime made sense.10 Such blinkered intransigence left him exposed to ridicule. Eden’s opposite number was the bespectacled, football-loving Anglophile, French Socialist leader Guy Mollet. The Frenchman was blessed with neither Eden’s suaveness nor his good looks: Eden, the old Etonian, had been dubbed ‘Lord Eyelashes’ by Italian journalists in the 1930s; Mollet, a former schoolteacher from Arras in Normandy, bore a striking resemblance to comedian Arthur Askey. But Mollet did escape the opprobrium that felled his British counterpart. The French Socialists, by then a highly-disciplined party, held together despite vigorous complaint from the Young Socialist wing led by Michel Rocard.11 Yet Mollet’s centre-left ‘Republican Front’ also collapsed a few months later, not over Suez, but over the issue that inspired the visceral French hatred of Nasser: the Algerian War.
The stronger language used to describe Eden’s mistakes add to the impression that the Suez crisis brought down a dark and heavy curtain on the British Empire, its strings pulled by the impatient hands of irresistible American power. Contemporary accounts lend colour to this image of a long-running, but hackneyed imperial show forced to close early.
Emerging from Downing Street on 28 June 1956 Harold Macmillan, still Chancellor at the time, recorded the sense of imperial problems clamouring for Cabinet attention in the weeks before Nasser’s announcement of the Suez Canal nationalization: ‘terrible agenda—Cyprus, Malta, Libya, Egypt—all trouble and mostly blackmail’.12 After nationalization on 26 July, ‘Suez’ became the all-consuming issue for an inner circle of favoured ministers in an ‘Egypt committee’. Its deliberations were often closed to wider Cabinet or Whitehall advice.13 For three months from mid July to mid October Eden and fellow committee members including the Foreign Secretary (Lloyd), Macmillan, and Lord Salisbury (Robert Cecil, formerly Viscount Cranborne) talked of using force only as a last resort.14 But, in a way, their past imperial rhetoric had already boxed them into a corner. Previous right-wing criticism of Labour’s ‘scuttle’ from Palestine and its handling of Persia’s nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in the Abadan crisis of May 1951 constrained Conservative choices in late 1956, suggesting that a firm hand in the Middle East was overdue.15
Figure 10. President Nasser announces the nationalization of the Suez Canal in Cairo, July 1956.
Sections of Fleet Street agreed. The three right-wing Daily s: the Express, Mail, and Telegraph, blustered about firmness in adversity. All three remained unrepentant when it backfired. Their imperialism, at least, was openly displayed.16 Most of Eden’s fellow ministers were less forthright—in public. The majority either shared their leader’s apocalyptic vision of Nasser as an Arab Mussolini bestriding the Arab world, or they acquiesced in it. Only two junior ministers resigned in protest. A third, more senior figure, the Minister of Defence Walter Monckton, quit his job for the lesser stresses of Postmaster General.17 More typical was Macmillan. ‘The leader of the bolters’, in other words, those ministers quickest to disavow their earlier backing for Eden, he was pre-eminent among the Cabinet members anxious to draw a veil over their earlier enthusiasm for military intervention.18 The British service chiefs were more honest. Chief of Imperial General Staff Sir Gerald Templer endorsed the tripartite invasion or ‘Operation Musketeer’; First Sea Lord Mountbatten opposed it; and Air Chief Marshal Sir Denis Smallwood dismissed Eden’s excuses for action as ‘utterly phoney’. (The complexity of the invasion—and the consequent scope for plans to go awry—is evident from Map 8 below.) In Parliament and the country, political parties, no less than radio listeners, pub drinkers, families, and long-time friendships, split over the issue. Labour boasted several strongly pro-Zionist figures who were willing to back Israel. The Conservative back-benches, rather like the Whitehall civil service, were never monolithically imperialist but expressed a wide spectrum of opinion from moral disgust to the die-hard empire loyalism of ‘Suez Group’ rowdies, Lord Salisbury, Julian Amery, and Neil ‘Billy’ McLean.19 One of the most high-profile ruptures was between the government and the BBC. The Corporation was uncomfortable with the role of semi-official government cheerleader both in its domestic programming and in its Arabic-language broadcasting.20 That Suez was immensely divisive is beyond doubt. But was it the definitive post-war turning point for the British Empire (or, indeed, the French)?
Again, the interpretational tide has flowed strongly in one direction for many years. As Scott Lucas puts it, the fates of the two principal imperial actors in this version of events are easily summarized: ‘France colludes, invades, but then leaves for the morass of Algeria and the demise of the Fourth Republic. Britain colludes, invades, and fails with an epilogue of imperial decline …’21 For all that, as he, Anthony Stockwell and others have shown, Suez was not the ‘beginning of the end’ for British colonial rule. Nor, as we are all now painfully aware, was it the last ill-judged western intervention in the Middle East. By 1956 British decolonization from the Indian subcontinent was an accomplished fact and its progress was far-advanced in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. After 1956 Britain’s Middle Eastern presence no longer hinged on Egypt, but it did not disappear. Instead, it shifted steadily eastwards towards the Persian Gulf and southern Arabia.22 Deposing Nasser was never an end in itself for France but, as we shall see, was adjunct to a strategy of conflict escalation in Algeria that continued regardless of the failure in Egypt.
Further complexity emerges when one recalls that Eden’s Middle Eastern record as Churchill’s Foreign Secretary after 1951 boasted some successes. He helped negotiate an Anglo-Egyptian treaty settlement in 1954 to evacuate British forces from the Suez Canal Zone and mend fences with the Colonels’ regime that seized power in the Young Officers’ revolution of 23 July 1952.23 The scale of Eden’s personal achievement in securing what was a hugely symbolic transfer of power emerges when one remembers three things. First, that an almost identical agreement on British military evacuation and redeployment had eluded the Attlee government.24 Second, that Eden persuaded Churchill to accept the case for withdrawal.25 And third, that in late January 1952 British forces from the vast Suez Canal base had been involved in bloody clashes with Egyptian police that left scores of policemen dead. This ‘battle of Ismailia’ helped ignite the revolution that brought the Egyptian military to power.26 Conclusion of the Canal base agreement two years later suggested—wrongly, as it turned out—that the British could do business with the Egyptian Colonels.27
Elements of the new French leadership also made unlikely warmongers at the start of 1956. Mollet’s Socialists and Pierre Mendès France’s Radicals, mainstays of the ‘Republican Front’ formed a month after a general election on 2 January, went to the polls promising a political breakthrough in Algeria to match independence accords in neighbouring Morocco and Tunisia. The voters who put them in office—younger, more bourgeois, and more female than those who preferred their right-wing opponents—hardly constituted a ‘war party’. As a ‘young Turk’ secretary general of the Socialist Party in 1946–7 Mollet had lambasted the older generation of socialist politicians that had engaged France more deeply in the Indochina War.28 Ten years later, under Pierre Commin, Mollet’s successor as party secretary, the Socialists directed secret contacts with Algerian nationalist leaders based in Cairo for much of 1956 hoping to negotiate a ceasefire.29 But Mollet had, by this point, dropped his earlier objections to engaging in colonial conflict. Within weeks of becoming premier, Mollet defied those among his socialist colleagues in France and abroad who considered immediate independence the only just outcome for Algerians. Nonsense, he argued. Algerian majority-rule would not be democratic or equitable; it would be dystopian and violent. Algeria’s settlers would be marginalized, evicted, or maybe even worse in a country likely to become either a one-party state, a theocratic Muslim regime, or a perverse mixture of both.30
Mendès France, too, was no imperial sentimentalist. But his recent experience of negotiating France’s pull-out from Morocco and Tunisia kept him from prophesying doom for an independent Algeria. Mendès was guided instead by his humanitarian convictions and his economist’s eye for the ‘cost-benefits’ of colonial commitments. He was also more accustomed to vitriolic right-wing criticism than Mollet. Applauded by some, he was loathed by others for making France face up to the imperatives of withdrawal from Vietnam and the two North African protectorates.31 Mendès France might have steered the Republican Front towards a flight solution constructed around early talks with the FLN had he remained in government. Instead, he resigned his ministerial post in May, unimpressed by the coalition’s financial management and disconcerted by its adventurism in Algeria.32 Mollet was, by then, heeding other, more belligerent voices: the Minister of Defence, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, the Army Minister Max Lejeune, and Pierre Boursicot, head of the French overseas intelligence service (the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage, SDECE).33 The Socialist leader was now in the camp of the die-hards.
Map 8. The Suez Operation, 1956.
What turned these once shrewd British and French proponents of ‘flight’ into implacable advocates of ‘fight’ in 1956? Or, to avoid reducing Suez to the wrong-headed adoption of a harder line by individual leaders, what drove Britain into such a disastrous confrontation in defiance of international law, UN opinion, and its Washington ally? And why did Mollet’s administration follow suit? Avowedly committed to talks with Algeria’s National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale—FLN), the Republican Front reversed course, making regime change in Cairo a central plank of its scheme to keep Algeria French. Answers lie in two things. First, the pervasive political atmosphere in which key decisions were made within the governing ‘inner circles’ in London and Paris, Second, the underlying conviction amongst the decision-makers that decisive action was essential to arrest their declining imperial position. The mistakes of Suez, in other words, derived, in part, from the flawed assumptions within tight-knit governing groups that were increasingly unreceptive to contrary advice. A classic case of ‘group think’, or the mutual reinforcement of shared presumptions among crisis decision-makers, this also amounted to a breakdown of Cabinet government in both countries.34 It became more difficult in consequence to respond constructively to deeper, impersonal forces—the inexorable disaggregation of the British and French empires, the heightened importance of the Middle East within the global Cold War, and the rising militancy among various strains of Arab nationalism.35 None of these dilemmas was new. But each was fatally misinterpreted as policy planning became more restricted, secretive, and uncompromising. The task now is to trace this drift towards ‘fight’ solutions in Britain and France.
To do so, it is first worth glancing below the Egyptian horizon to the country’s southern neighbour, Sudan. Here was another imperial interest that, in British eyes, faced a Nasserite threat. The key dynamics in this vast territory, technically a condominium—or joint protectorate of Britain and Egypt—were the permissible extent of Egyptian influence and the countervailing wisdom of ‘Sudanization’, by which was meant the progressive indigenization of administrative services. Over the preceding decades the British, as Heather Sharkey puts it, ‘unwittingly gave nationalism an institutional framework’ because of their operating principle that a colony should pay its way. The frugality that this imposed made reliance on locally-educated and trained Sudanese government servants inevitable. Most of these Sudanese officials were northerners and graduates of Khartoum’s Gordon College secondary school. This all-male administrative elite became the local officials, known as mamurs and sub-mamurs, who were charged with policing and tax collection tasks in tandem with the assistant district commissioners of Britain’s Sudan Political Service. Sudanization accelerated further in the decade 1945–55, making an orderly flight seem predictable, logical, and only a matter of time. This was a view expressed by the Sudanese Graduate Congress, educated future officials who, in 1942, demanded self-government after the war.36
Increasing talk of self-rule did not imply an end to British interventionism, however. The controversial practice of clitoridectomy was a case in point. Spurred by criticism from British women’s groups, colonial opposition to clitoridectomy, or female genital cutting, culminated in a February 1946 law banning the practice. Was this ‘progress’ or an attack on customary tradition? Surely it was both. But this late colonial campaign against female circumcision was, if anything, driven by economic concerns. Officials and medical staff concurred that ‘infibulation led to poor maternity outcomes’. Eliminating the practice was intended to spur population growth and foster women’s mothering skills.37 Sudan’s British rulers, it seems, were still convinced they knew best.
The foundational justifications for British imperial supremacy in the Sudan—to protect the Sudanese from otherwise certain domination by their northern neighbour—collapsed once the leaders of Egypt’s new military government declared their support for Sudanese self-determination. From 1953 onwards, the Egyptians and the Sudanese set the agenda and the pace for Sudanese independence.38 Conservative Ministers and Foreign Office diplomats meanwhile hoped that their accommodating attitude to Sudan would be reciprocated by Egypt’s new leadership in the more important discussions over the long-term future of the Suez Canal zone. Redolent of the ‘high imperialism’ of the Victorian era, trade and military prerogatives triumphed over concern for Sudanese internal stability.39
The growing alarmism about anti-imperial trends in the Middle East becomes easier to read when placed in this light. In late November 1955 General ‘Pasha’ Glubb, head of Jordan’s Arab Legion security forces warned Eden that not just Egypt, but Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Syria were all ‘irrevocably in the Soviet bag’. Glubb’s hyperbole was a transparent attempt to secure additional funding for his beloved Legion.40 But it pointed to the greater prevalence of Cold War rhetoric in high-level discussions of Britain’s Middle East prospects in the year ahead. Typical in this regard was a Foreign Office paper, ‘Communism and Africa’, circulated to ministers in mid April 1956. The Soviets, the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd averred, were fast acquiring a deeper knowledge of African affairs. And they used arms sales, ‘cultural’ exchanges, and front organizations such as the World Federation of Trade Unions to enhance their influence over nationalist groups. Pointing to a raft of new African studies academies in Moscow, Lloyd was unequivocal, ‘When suddenly the history, economics, languages, and social relations of Africa are stepped up by political directive to the point where the work now being done on Africa compares with that done in South-East Asia, it is clear that this is for operational reasons rather than an academic love of science.’41 Months before the nationalization of the Canal, the Egyptian regime’s anti-colonial pan-Arabism was recast as quasi-Communistic.
Admittedly, the Cairo government courted international backing for the causes of Arab independence and the right of return of Palestinian refugees expelled from their homeland in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Integral to this process were procuring arms from the Eastern bloc and cultivating ties with socialist regimes in the Non-Aligned Movement, Tito’s Yugoslavia especially.42 The one thing that Britain, France, and the US agreed upon in early 1956 was that the Egyptian leadership was becoming more vigorously anti-imperialist as it grew militarily stronger. Anglo-American efforts to broker an Egyptian–Israeli settlement sweetened by the offer of financial assistance for construction of Egypt’s Aswan Dam proved fruitless. The scheme, known as Project Alpha, also looked increasingly naive.43 By contrast, French investment in military cooperation with Israel, previously vilified as avaricious realpolitik, began to look shrewder.44 When Jordan’s King Hussein, previously considered reliably Anglophile, dismissed Glubb on 1 March 1956, Downing Street and the Foreign office mistakenly attributed the sacking to Nasser’s malign influence. The ousted General became an oracle for hard-liners in Westminster and Whitehall.45 Eden rehearsed Glubb’s dire predictions in correspondence with Eisenhower in the months ahead. In late July he told the American president that Nasser was ‘active wherever Muslims can be found’. He was no Hitler, but the parallel with Mussolini, another Mediterranean empire-builder, was ‘close’.46 On the night of 27 July, after news reached London of the Suez nationalization, the Prime Minister summoned the French Ambassador Jean Chauvel, telling him that France, like Britain, faced an acid test of western solidarity.47
In early September Eden took his doom-laden analogies a step further. Egyptian seizure of the Canal was ‘the opening gambit in a planned campaign … to expel all Western influence and interests from Arab countries’. If successful, Nasser’s pan-Arabist ideology would foment revolution throughout North Africa and western Asia. Once Operation Musketeer began, Eden distilled his earlier musings into three self-justificatory sentences: ‘if we had allowed things to drift, everything would have gone from bad to worse. Nasser would have become a kind of Moslem Mussolini and our friends in Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and even Iran would gradually have been brought down. His efforts would have spread westwards, and Libya and all North Africa would have been brought under his control.’48
With the benefit of hindsight, Eden’s nightmarish vision of Egyptian-backed military regimes from Iraq to Libya was less outlandish than it seemed to his opponents at the time. Even the Labour opposition accepted that Nasser’s actions were blatantly provocative. With more than a tinge of racism, Aneurin Bevan commented, ‘if the sending of one’s police and soldiers into the darkness of the night to seize somebody else’s property is nationalisation, Ali Baba used the wrong terminology’.49 No one on the government or opposition frontbenches recalled that Nasser-inspired interventionism was a recent phenomenon, the Egyptian state not having been at the forefront of the Arab nationalist movement before the revolution that brought the Colonel to power in July 1952.50
The idea of Arab dominos falling because of Egyptian prodding certainly resonated in Paris where official preoccupation with the Algerian FLN’s external sources of support was becoming an obsession. French politicians and press were even more outspoken in their condemnation of Nasser’s regime. Again war memories cast a long shadow. For Mollet, the Colonel was a ‘Hitler’, his writings comparable to Mein Kampf. The Minister of Justice François Mitterrand, proponent of an expanded war effort in Algeria, spoke of ‘liquidating’ the troublesome Pharaoh. For newspapers of right and left, overthrow of the Egyptian regime presented an opportunity to prevent another Munich. If the rhetoric was familiar, its articulation in the language of ‘resistance’ was not. Mollet’s closest ministerial colleagues, including Bourgès-Maunoury, the principal architect of French intervention, had resistance backgrounds. So did many of their senior advisers, military figures, colonial appointees, and security service operatives. Like their Israeli allies, they adapted more easily than their British counterparts to the practices of covert planning, sabotage, and audacious ‘behind the lines’ actions that characterized the Suez invasion.51 Former intelligence officers and Suez group members Julian Amery and Billy McLean were, in this respect, exceptions and not the rule.52 Behind everything the Frenchmen did lay the Algerian fixation.53
The French Army had over 320,000 soldiers deployed in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia on 1 January 1956. 180,451 were in Algeria alone.54 Yet remarkably few politicians thought these huge numbers were large enough. New Year bombings in two Algerian provincial towns—Bône (Anneba) in the east and Tizi Ouzou, capital of Berber Kabylia—announced an intensification of attacks by the FLN’s military wing, the National Liberation Army (in French: ALN). French settlers, powerfully represented by Algeria’s mayoral federation, insisted that the first responsibility of the new French government was to ensure security, not rush ahead with reform.55 As is explained more fully in Chapter 11, this sequential mantra of ‘order before reform’ would be repeatedly cited to postpone major policy initiatives from the reorganization of local government to land redistribution and tax reform.56 If any government were to buck this trend, it was Mollet’s. This was not because the Socialists received a strong mandate from the electorate in the January elections (indeed, the Communist PCF fared much better with 5.5 million votes), but because the two political parties most critical of generous concessions to the FLN saw their vote collapse. The Christian Democrat MRP, the moving force behind the escalation of war in Indochina, lost out to the Radicals. And electors punished persistent squabbling within the Gaullist RPF, which mustered fewer than 850,000 votes, down from four million plus at the last national election in July 1951.57 (It is worth remembering this in light of de Gaulle’s conspicuous silence as the Suez crisis developed.)
Conclusive only for its losers, the 1956 election result was not a mandate for peace in Algeria. It took a month before the new coalition was invested in office. Yet over the eight weeks of February–March 1956 the Republican Front government wrought more fundamental change in the Algerian War than that which would follow de Gaulle’s spectacular return to power in the ‘May crisis’ of 1958 (discussed in Chapter 10). The transformation in the Algerian scene in early 1956 did not mark the fulfilment of pre-election promises for a wider Algerian franchise, local government reform, and an end to conflict. It signalled their abandonment. Algerian settlers, a constituency that the New York Times identified as a ‘dictatorship of the populace’, were the reason why.58
Mollet visited Algiers on 6 February hoping to galvanize support for a package of reforms. Twenty years to the day after bloody rioting between ultra-rightists and their opponents in Paris, he was greeted by settler protests coordinated by a new generation of die-hards—post-war inheritors of the anti-republican, ultra-rightist mantle.59 Three were colonial establishment insiders: Jean-Baptiste Biaggi, right-hand man of the former governor Jacques Soustelle; Amédée Froger, mayor of Boufarik, a colon farming town south of Algiers; and André Achiary, the infamous sub-prefect who directed vigilante killings in Guelma in 1945. Two others were rabble-rousers: Joseph Ortiz, thuggish leader of Algeria’s Poujadists, a reactionary petit-bourgeois movement that had just broken through at the polls; and Pierre Lagaillarde, student activist at Algiers University and, later, a founder of the terroristic Organisation de l’Année Secrète (OAS). As Mollet struggled to be heard behind a cordon of paramilitary CRS at the Algiers cenotaph, demonstrators pelted him with tomatoes, their ‘ammunition’ supplied by a wholesaler’s truck concealed from police view.60
The settlers were furious that their man, the former governor Soustelle, was to be replaced with a ‘Resident-Minister’, Georges Catroux. Both men shared wartime associations with de Gaulle’s Free French movement. But their colonial paths had since diverged. Catroux, a retired Army General, wartime Governor in Syria, and key negotiator of Moroccan independence, was an imperial pro-consul with over forty years’ experience, patriarchal in the tradition of his original mentor, Marshal Lyautey.61 Soustelle was a professional anthropologist turned Gaullist apparatchik, fervent in his commitment to Algerian ‘integration’ with France and, by 1956, a darling of the settlers.62 Catroux suffered by comparison. He was derided as the government’s placeman, the unpopular receiver sent in to wind up the company as the inevitable prelude to withdrawal. For all their playground antics, the settlers, many of them ex-servicemen from the capital’s poorer districts, were deadly serious. Mollet, herded by police into the government buildings of the Palais d’été, was visibly shaken by his first brush with settler politics. Told about the incident over the telephone later that afternoon, Catroux resigned immediately. 6 February 1956, the jour des tomates, looked like the settlers’ first successful coup d’état of the Algerian War.
It is, indeed, tempting to ascribe the French government’s subsequent decision to request parliamentary ‘special powers’ to place Algeria under emergency rule as an abject capitulation to reactionary settler demands. FLN activists saw it that way. They were contemptuous of the Socialists’ sham liberalism; still more so of the French Communists’ willingness to support war in contravention of their so-called internationalism. An understandable reaction, it neglects three considerations. First was Mollet’s interpretation of the Algiers protests as the authentic reaction of Algeria’s ‘poor white’ working class to the threat of abandonment by a political elite ignorant of the realities of FLN terrorism. Government approval of extended military powers was justified in the language of republican defence, of safeguarding loyal citizens and making Algeria safe for eventual reform.
Second was the implicit acknowledgement among the Fourth Republic’s centrist parties, the Socialist Party included, that the professional army, having been inadequately supported in Indochina, deserved wholehearted backing. The strategic rationale for this was always secondary to the tense politics of French civil–military relations. French public opinion, wavering but generally unsympathetic to the settler cause, was also more inclined to back the armed forces. This explains why the Communists, still angling for a place in the ruling coalition, backed the parliamentary vote on ‘special powers’ on 12 March.63 The PCF decision was all the more remarkable because their client Communist party in Algeria was facing a renewed government ban.64
The third point was that Robert Lacoste, the man selected to replace Catroux, was assigned the task of combining extended repressive powers with the resumption of welfare reforms, educational provision, and other improvements to Algerian living standards. A veteran trade unionist and another left-wing politician with immaculate resistance credentials (his father was shot by German occupation forces in March 1944), Lacoste was republican patriot personified.
Each of these factors points to the emotional and cultural perceptions of the Algerian conflict among politicians of the Fourth Republic, many of them, like Mollet (born 1905), Bourgès-Maunoury (born 1914), and Lacoste (born 1898), for whom wartime resistance and the restoration of republican democracy in France was the defining event of their adult lives. It was no coincidence that the Army Minister Max Lejeune named the decision to begin sending young conscripts (Appelés) and twenty-something reservists (Rappelés) to serve in Algeria from April onwards Operation Valmy in evocation of French citizens’ defence of an imperilled First French Republic in 1792. Operation Valmy’s call to arms failed to resonate with those affected by it—national servicemen not previously called upon to fight nasty colonial wars; older reservists, often their family’s sole bread-winner; and the loved ones thrown into confusion by their unanticipated departure. A grass-roots protest movement mushroomed, but failed to win party political endorsement. In Rouen, Paris, Limoges, and Lyons police herded reluctant soldiers onto trains bound for the Mediterranean embarkation ports. Mothers, wives, and girlfriends blocked the tracks. Barrack-room indiscipline was widespread.65 Hatred of officialdom, the military, and the Algerian War melded into a kind of generational alienation from the former résistantes in government whose good fortune had been to fight for something worthwhile.66
The stakes involved changed dramatically soon after dawn on 18 May 1956 when ALN fighters ambushed a French infantry patrol picking its way through the massifs of the Palestro gorge, eighty kilometres south-east of Algiers. Seventeen soldiers were killed, four more captured. The corpses were stripped then mutilated, some beyond recognition. With the exception of their junior officer, sub-Lieutenant Hervé Artur, an eager recruit from Casablanca, the dead men were all Rappelés from the Paris region. Among them, as the tabloid France Dimanche’s banner headline phrased it, were ‘seven husbands, four fathers, seven fiancés’. Larger massacres than this one, often involving French troops as killers not victims, were not uncommon in Algeria. And local civilians in dirt-poor areas like the Palestro region were their principal victims. But ‘Palestro’ shocked France precisely because the annihilation of these suburban family men, reluctant warriors coerced into uniform, encapsulated so much: the cruel arbitrariness of Plan Valmy, the anguish of families ignored by government; the FLN’s terrifying ruthlessness; the dystopian cycle of worsening Algerian violence.67
One month later, prison warders dragged Ahmed Zabana and Ferradj Abdelkader Ben Moussa into the courtyard of the Algiers Barberousse jail. The unfortunate duo was bound hand and foot, their heads locked into position inside the contraption that dominated the yard. When the blade came down they became the first FLN prisoners guillotined for terrorism. More would follow, to the delight of the settler press. But the majority of political killings in the Algerian capital occurred on its streets. Assassinations, disappearances, and indiscriminate bombings at traffic intersections, in cafés, and in the city’s Casbah continued into the autumn. Bombings in Muslim quartiers were orchestrated by settler extremists led by André Achiary, a confidant of the SDECE’s shadowy counter-espionage unit. Saadi Yacef and a team of young women bombers, including Zohra Drif and Djamila Bouhired, planned the explosions in the capital’s European districts.68 After the notorious ‘Milk Bar’ bombings on 30 September, immortalized in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, the overwhelming impression was of a city and a conflict spiralling out of control. Special powers, Lacoste’s reforms, Plan Valmy were plainly not working. Might an Egyptian solution exist?
This was certainly the message given to a British parliamentary delegation that toured Algeria between 15 and 22 October. Led by Walter Elliott, a former Secretary of State for Scotland whose time at the Ministry of Agriculture deepened his attachment to France, the nine British MPs received red carpet treatment. After visiting new housing projects in Algiers, they were entertained by Resident Minister Lacoste and the city’s mayor Jacques Chevalier. Each insisted that France had to win the war—for the sake of moderates on all sides, for the sake of western influence in Africa. Nasser, they went on was behind everything but was himself probably just an unwitting Moscow stooge. This was music to the ears of Elliot and Julian Amery, the two most active members of the British delegation. So, too, was the message they received during their next formal engagement, a meal with the ‘super-prefect’ (or IGAME) for Eastern Algeria, Maurice Papon. Better known to history for his 1990s trial for war crimes against French Jews, Papon spent much longer serving the Algerian colonial state than Pétain’s Second World War regime. A notorious hardliner who played a crucial role in constructing the institutional apparatus of the Algerian police state, Papon was at the time much respected by French governmental and Gaullist oppositional opinion in France. Talking to his British guests with customary frankness, he convinced them that France would crush its FLN opponents. A final, well-orchestrated army visit saw the MPs’ delegation deposited at the Oran arsenal where weapons captured from Algerian fighters were stored. Over half, including 1956-model Bren guns, were of British manufacture, definitive proof, it was stated, that the weapons came, not from British but from Egyptian military sources.69
Not all shades of British parliamentary opinion were so willing to be convinced. Speaking a month before the delegation visit, John Strachey, a former Labour War Office minister, told an audience in Dundee that of all the stupidities to which Eden’s government might fall prey, the worst would be to embark on a joint military venture with France against Nasser’s Egypt. Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell said much the same in private correspondence with Eden and Selwyn Lloyd in the weeks after nationalization, adding that firm US backing was an absolute prerequisite should intervention take place.70 Instead, by mid-October Britain risked becoming involved in an unjustifiable fight to undermine Arab support for Algerian independence. The results would be disastrous.71 With the exception of the Communists, few French parliamentarians had any such reservations. To understand why, we need to wind the clock back a little.
‘France considers it more important to defeat Colonel Nasser’s enterprise than to win ten battles in Algeria.’ Thus did Foreign Minister Christian Pineau justify French calls for a riposte to nationalization of the Suez Canal in discussion with his British and US counterparts in London on 30 July 1956.72 At this stage, it was not weapons but bugging and the theft of documents from Egypt’s Paris Embassy by the French internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) that registered greater impact. Conducted as part of an intelligence war against FLN fundraising inside and outside France, the ‘active surveillance’ of the Egyptian Embassy allegedly confirmed Nasser’s pivotal role as the Algerians’ chief foreign backer.73 The British security services also did their part, passing on information to Paris about illicit Egyptian arms supplies via Tunisia to the FLN for eighteen months before the Suez Operation.74 Little wonder that on 23 June 1956 SDECE head Boursicot, and Defence Ministry representatives Abel Thomas and Louis Mangin agreed a major arms contract with Shimon Peres and Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan. Its centrepiece was seventy-two state-of-the-art Mystère IV jets, enough to transform the balance of air power in the Middle East. Israel’s lugubrious premier David Ben-Gurion, not a natural Francophile, enthused that, ‘with an ally like France, Israel is willing to go all the way’.75 Israel’s decisive aerial advantage might not last long, however. Aware that Egypt’s closest Arab partner, Syria, was awaiting delivery of two squadrons of Soviet MiG 15 fighters, the French general staff was sure that speed was of the essence.76 The stresses of Algeria had set France on the path to collusion.
After the special powers vote, Plan Valmy, and public revulsion at Palestro, conspiring with Israel to overthrow Nasser was less of a departure for the French government than for the British. Put simply, the more remarkable fight decision—to escalate in Algeria—was taken in March. (The importance of this decision is discussed in Chapter 11.) Its significance becomes clearer in light of France’s financial position in early 1956. The preceding government achieved a modest balance of payments surplus in 1955, the first since the end of the Second World War. So the Republican Front came into office with the budgetary books in relatively good order. Algerian War costs changed this. 300 billion francs were spent in 1956 alone, adding to a budget deficit, which was careening towards the one trillion franc mark as the Suez venture crumbled. In desperation, the government drew heavily on its foreign currency reserves to maintain franc values. External trade plummeted meanwhile, increasing the risk of recession at home.77 There was, though, a crucial difference between the French and British financial positions. The Bank of France had secured necessary US loan funding prior to the invasion decision at Sèvres. The French could afford to be brazen, if only in the short term, whereas the British, as we shall see, could not.
That brazenness, and the absence of political accountability to which it pointed, was hidden from public view in the Sèvres discussions.78 Instead, French voters were still left with the image of cool responsibility conjured up by the Foreign Minister, Pineau, when he took to the French airwaves four weeks earlier, on the evening of 14 September. Pineau’s aim, he said, was to prove that the proponents of talks with Nasser were misguided. It was not that Mollet’s government was determined to use force no matter what. Quite the reverse: the French government wanted peace. It was working hard to lessen Cold War tension and was committed to improving living standards for the world’s poorest communities. But advances in these and other fields of overseas policy demanded respect for the rules of international law and existing treaties.79 Nasser was the outlaw, not France. Events later indicated that Pineau was being somewhat economical with the truth.
By the time the Sèvres talks began, the French authorities were facing bitter criticism from Arab and African governments over another breach of international law—a mid-air hijack of the FLN’s external leadership. The background to this event lay in the earlier secret exchanges between Socialist politicians and the FLN executive, central to which were Habib Bourguiba’s Tunisian government and Morocco’s monarchical regime. The lynch-pin between them was Alain Savary, Minister for Moroccan and Tunisian Affairs and the Socialists’ veteran negotiator with the Vietminh.80 After Mendès France’s resignation in May, Savary personified the liberal wing of Mollet’s government, which was rapidly losing ground to the hard-liners grouped around the Defence Minister Bourgès-Maunoury. Both men achieved political prominence young. Savary, an outstanding student at Sciences-Po, helped organize the Free French takeover of the tiny island colony of St Pierre et Miquelon off the Newfoundland coast. He became the territory’s Governor at the tender age of twenty-three. A more doctrinaire socialist than Mollet, Savary instinctively grasped the confluence between popular nationalism and leftist egalitarianism represented by anti-colonial groups like the Vietminh and Bourguiba’s Neo-Destour as well as by senior FLN figures like Mohamed Boudiaf and Hocine Aït Ahmed.81 A Polytechnicien and, later, an accomplished resistance organizer, Bourgès-Maunoury also cemented his reputation as a young man. He was, though, a more strident nationalist than the cosmopolitan Savary. Bourgès-Maunoury invested his energies in consolidating the Radical Party’s regional, south-western power-base in and around Toulouse. Hawkish in colonial affairs, he stood at the heart of the French security establishment of senior military personnel, intelligence officers, and police prefects. A firm supporter of Papon’s repressive methods, Bourgès-Maunoury had no time for the ideological pretensions of their Algerian opponents, whose contacts with Savary he was impatient to end.
It was Sultan Mohammed V who, in mid April, organized preliminary talks with FLN envoys on neutral ground: the Spanish cities of Madrid and Seville. Anxious lest its own pending independence be jeopardized by the violence in neighbouring Algeria, Morocco’s governing elite, like their Tunisian brethren, were understandably eager to mediate a settlement. The French government, and especially the Defence Ministry, responded coolly, nervous that cherished base rights in Morocco might form part of any bargain.82 Savary was, however, allowed to keep the door ajar. With his encouragement, the Moroccans and Tunisians organized a round-table conference in Tunis scheduled to begin in late October to give a fillip to negotiations. Four members of the FLN executive—Boudiaf, Aït Ahmed, Mohammed Khider and Ahmed Ben Bella—therefore accepted the Sultan’s offer of a DC 3 aircraft to fly them from Rabat to the Tunisian capital on the 22nd.83 Alerted by the DST to the plane’s VIP cargo, once it entered Algerian air space the bait proved irresistible to the French air force and army commanders Air Marshal Frandon and General Lorillot. Frandon ordered the pilot to land in Algiers, disgorging his passengers for immediate arrest.84 Neither Governor Lacoste in Algiers nor Mollet in Paris were alerted beforehand. Coming only six days after the French navy had intercepted the steamship Athos, seizing a substantial cargo of Egyptian-supplied weaponry destined for the ALN, detention of the four FLN executive members, although unauthorized, proved wildly popular among Algerian settlers and commentators in France.85 Security service officers were quick to publicize details of twelve kilograms of FLN documents found aboard the aircraft, which indicated that the Algerian rebellion was sustained financially and militarily with Egyptian aid.86
Whatever the expediency of arresting the FLN leaders, the Algiers hijack exposed breaks in the chain of government decision-making between Paris and Algiers. Although Eisenhower’s administration chose to keep quiet—for now—the hijack, a flagrant violation of commercial air-space, convinced the White House that the French government was out of control.87 Mollet had even offered the plane safe passage so that Savary’s negotiation effort could be sustained. The two intransigents—Bourgès-Maunoury at Defence and the Army Minister Max Lejeune—approved the action before their prime minister even knew about it. Mollet’s subsequent acquiescence, partly in response to the favourable French public reaction, partly because he anticipated that the FLN would be significantly weakened by the ‘decapitation’, was also misplaced.88 Incarcerated in the Paris La Santé prison, the four Algerian nationalists could do nothing to prevent the emergence of a more combative ALN strategy to which Ben Bella and Boudiaf in particular were strongly opposed. The temporary eclipse of the FLN’s external directorate consolidated the power of the movement’s internal leadership as a result. Organized into a five-member committee (Comité de Coordination et d’Exécution—CCE) at a critical secret FLN meeting—the Soummam Congress—five months earlier in August, the CCE approved the extension of FLN terrorism to Algeria’s urban centres, Algiers especially. According to the capital’s mayor Jacques Chevalier, a reformer with an unofficial back-channel to the FLN, the movement was now firmly in the hands of hard-line regional (wilaya) commanders: Belkacem Krim, Ramdane Abbane, and Omar Ouamrane.89 The Republican Front’s Algerian strategy was going disastrously wrong even before the attack on Egypt began.
In a sense, the same was true for Britain, albeit for monetary, more than political, reasons. The supreme irony of Suez was that a key motive for British action against Nasser was to defend the sterling exchange rate and the sterling area. Yet Britain’s currency, its foreign exchange reserve, and its vital oil supplies were all undermined by the confrontational path chosen. Eisenhower was unconvinced by Eden’s arguments about the extent of the Egyptian danger and the best way to handle it.90
‘Anthony, are you out of your mind?’ was the President’s first reaction.91 Opposed to military intervention and infuriated at being deceived with the apparent fait accompli of invasion, the US government made expert use of its ‘economic artillery’ to sink British plans.92 Eisenhower’s Republican administration, preparing for presidential elections on 6 November 1956, included several former bankers and corporate lawyers. They included Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, head of the CIA, as well as the industrialist George Humphrey, US Treasury Secretary. All agreed that the time had come to flex American financial muscle.93 Withholding loan funding precipitated a disastrous ‘run’ on sterling in the first week of November that spelt the end for the Suez operation.94 The Bank of England’s dollar reserves collapsed as the Treasury struggled to defend the pound and avoid a last-ditch appeal to the IMF for monetary aid. It was a hopeless task. Only when the British backed down did Washington reverse its position, making IMF credits worth 1.3 billion dollars available on 10 December.95
Reduced to its essence, Suez marked a definitive rebuff to what Martin Lynn terms, ‘imperial unilateralism’: the mistaken belief that Britain could still pursue imperial policies at variance with US interests.96 British imperial ‘prestige’, for so long critical to maintaining colonial control, was revealed as an elaborate fraud, less substance than hot air.97 This was precisely what Secretary of State Dulles told Eisenhower’s National Security Council on 1 November as Musketeer reverberated through Washington: US alliance commitments to Britain and France should not imply any indulgence towards their colonial policies.98
In fact, the crisis was less definitive than Dulles’ remarks suggest. Once American displeasure was made plain, ‘normal service’ quickly resumed. The Treasury got the financial bailout. Extensive military spending on imperial defence was barely affected, particularly in Malaysia and Singapore, where the end of the Malayan Emergency would be followed by the emergence of a more substantial threat—an expansionist Indonesian state. Suez Group diehards blustered in the Commons and in the press about American interference and the threat it posed to the Atlantic alliance. But, as the French Ambassador Jean Chauvel commented, by the end of November their complaints carried little weight.99 Relations with Washington were bruised but not seriously wounded by the Eden government’s flawed pursuit of an imperial fight. And it cannot be reasonably claimed that any Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ suddenly became unequal. The commanding strength of America’s financial lever had been apparent since at least 1945 when John Maynard Keynes took the Treasury’s begging bowl to Washington in search of a loan. Frequent UN General Assembly attacks on Britain and, more especially, France would confirm that the case for empire was ‘morally disarmed’ by the dishonesty and stupidity of Suez. Like so many capable civil servants who might have warned against it, the British delegation to the UN, including a young Douglas Hurd, was not even informed about the impending invasion.100 Yet, with the important exception of nearby Cyprus, Britain’s imperial connections were only marginally contaminated by the crisis and its international fallout.101
Perhaps, then, Julian Amery’s rueful identification of Suez as Britain’s imperial Waterloo was overdrawn. It is harder still to make the case that the 1956 crisis marked an equally decisive defeat for France.102 Admittedly, some leading figures in French political life were outraged by their government’s Machiavellian behaviour. On the afternoon of 31 October, the first day of the Franco-British invasion, Pierre Cot, a former Popular Front minister and alleged Communist fellow-traveller who we encountered during the acrimonious parliamentary inquest into the Cao Bang ‘disaster’, took the floor in the Chamber of Deputies to condemn this latest French colonial misadventure. ‘What right did France have to intervene?’ he asked. Surely his fellow deputies could see that the pretexts for attacking Egypt were a sham? Cot’s speech was impressively forthright, but the National Assembly was engaged in a dialogue of the deaf. There was no appetite on the Left to take Mollet to task when the Soviet Union was acting in equally flagrant disregard of sovereignty and human rights in Hungary. Indeed, Cot was repeatedly interrupted by furious right-wingers insistent that France at least had a case for sending in the troops unlike the Soviet Union.103 Members of the French diplomatic community were less sanguine about France’s disregard for international law, although the Foreign Ministry issued a ludicrous circular to all of France’s overseas embassies on 31 October stating that France was invading Egypt to restore peace to the Middle East.104
Behind such bravado, senior French diplomats took steps to prevent details of the Sèvres collusion from leaking out. Embassy staff in Washington and in European and Asian capitals reassured their host governments that, whatever the rumours, France was acting in the interests of regional stability.105 But this brief panic soon passed. Unlike Eden, Mollet did not fall from grace. Indeed, the country united behind him, accepting the government’s argument that Nasser’s overthrow was a moral imperative because it would shorten the Algerian War.106 On 20 December he won a parliamentary vote of confidence resoundingly 325 to 210. Opinion polls confirmed that more French people approved of the invasion after it than before.107 For France, by contrast, Suez was less a short-term humiliation than a long-term reverse. Although Mollet’s Republican Front survived, and was even commended for its resolve, the fact remained that the Fourth Republic ‘system’ they represented had suffered another crushing blow. The regime’s Gaullist opponents savaged the fallacy of strategic alignment with either one of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ powers. Efforts to thwart the internationalization of the Algerian conflict were in vain. French standing in the Arab world and its prickly relations with Washington were sorely tested for years afterward. In these circumstances, the case for accelerated development of French nuclear weaponry seemed to make itself. So did the argument for a continental European Community, enthusiastically underlined by the West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and soon underwritten by the Treaty of Rome in March 1957.108
Just as significant as the international ramifications were the consequences for Algeria and the fraught relationship between French officialdom and its armed forces. The keenest proponents of the French fight strategy against Nasser were its executors—the professional army elite in Algiers. The extensive French military commitment to Musketeer came with a strongly North African flavour. French assault forces comprised two elite divisions—the 10th parachutists and the 7th rapid mechanized—each based in Algeria. These units, along with the aircraft carrier Georges Leygues (which shelled Rafah on 1 November in support of Israeli ground forces) and French aircraft operating from Israel and Cyprus, were placed under British command.109 British commanders were acutely embarrassed by the Rafah shelling and the fact that French aircraft sported joint forces markings.110 Both actions brought the extent of Franco-British collusion with Israel into plain sight, prompting Eden to telegram a personal plea to Mollet for greater discretion.111 Labour MPs, led by Richard Crossman, were looking for evidence of double-dealing both to make the case for a full parliamentary inquiry and to prove the moral argument against Eden’s government.112 Little wonder that ministers and military commanders urged French discretion.
British calls for restraint seemed nonsensical to senior officers of the 10th Division, another empire fighting force. It included one Foreign Legion regiment and another designated solely for colonial operations. They were assigned the toughest element in the Musketeer plan—capturing Port Said and Port Fuad. Their success in doing so nourished the conviction among the French assault troops that it was British wavering that snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.113 Here, again, the British seemed peevish, not to say racist, in asking the French Chief of Staff General Paul Ely to ensure that Senegalese troops were not included among the Port Said occupation force.114 Rumour had it that disgruntled French parachutists, returning to Algeria via Cyprus after the 6 November ceasefire, ‘lost’ some of their equipment—small arms that fell into the hands of Cypriot EOKA guerrillas. Like his men, their commander, Jacques Massu, soon to achieve notoriety for directing the battle of Algiers in 1957, had spent years on active service in Indochina and North Africa, including Second World War service with the Free French in the Libyan Fezzan. Fiercely independent, with a distinctive moustache and prominent, hooked nose, Massu exemplified a strain of thought among professional officers in the colonial army, suspicious of Parisian politicking and certain that decisive military leadership was the empire’s only salvation. The illicit supply of weapons nearly changed matters for him too. He had narrowly escaped assassination a month earlier when his staff car was peppered with bullets—probably fired by an Egyptian-supplied machine gun.115
The Defence Ministry autopsy on the Suez operations submitted to defence chiefs by the overall French commander Admiral Pierre Barjot, on 31 December pleased Massu more than it did Mollet. Unrepentant, it reached three telling conclusions. First, the collapse in British political resolve denied France the opportunity to secure decisive advantage in Algeria. Second, it was therefore vital that France acquire the means—amphibious vessels and long-range strike aircraft—to conduct comparable ventures alone, possibly outside NATO’s restrictive command structure. Third, there was no reason to be apologetic. Fighting for France and its empire might require further operations of this type in future.116 Decidedly Gaullist in his conclusions, Barjot’s unashamedly bullish analysis pointed to the further expansion of French military involvement—and military control—in Algeria where, by the year’s end, force numbers had risen to almost 400,000. It was a bleak, combative vision, the full horrors of which would become apparent in the months ahead.
The Suez crisis presents the clearest instance in which Britain and France chose to ‘fight’ together to defend imperial interests in the face of hostile international opinion. For all the rivalries, jealousies, and confrontations supposedly characteristic of British and French imperial co-existence, the two countries, on occasion, worked as close allies when the demands of colonial inter-dependence became obvious to both sides. The consequences could be devastating, and not just for the objects of their joint military ventures. As we saw in Chapter 4, British military occupation of southern Vietnam, initially presented as a facet of the disarmament of Japanese occupation forces in Southeast Asia, was actually driven by support for the restoration of French colonial authority in Indochina. So critical was this intervention that Britain has been depicted by some analysts as undermining the Vietnamese revolution of August 1945 and thus catalysing the outbreak of the Indochina War.117 But the Suez War of November–December 1956 was the most infamous case of joint imperial interventionism in the era of decolonization.
In the short term, Suez weighed heavier on Britain as both a political disaster and a symbolic eclipse. It cost Anthony Eden the premiership and sent Britain’s stock of international prestige plummeting. Yet its longer-term consequences were less explosive. The gradual realignment of Britain’s Middle East interests, moving inexorably away from the eastern Mediterranean and towards the Persian Gulf, was not much affected. In this sense, the changing focus in the regional operations of British Petroleum’s antecedent, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in the Middle East—broadly speaking, away from Iran and Egypt and towards Kuwait and the Persian Gulf—mirrored the strategic shifts in British policy as the dust settled after the 1956 crisis.118 Most important, the country’s cherished relationship with the United States was soon rebuilt.
Remembered in Britain for the political earthquake it triggered at home, ‘Suez’ is rarely acknowledged for what it was. Suez was a covertly planned Franco-British war of aggression against a sovereign state. Its protagonists (particularly in the security services and imperial armed forces of both countries) tried to justify it as an expedient means to safeguard imperial and trade interests—Britain’s in the Middle East; France’s in North Africa. The crisis has not been short of its historical analysts. Yet the colonial interdependence and imperialist cultures that underpinned this Franco-British alliance still merit closer scrutiny, not least because the intervention went so disastrously wrong, ending in bitter recriminations on all sides. Here, then, was an instance—perhaps the instance—in which the limits to effective bilateral collaboration in an international system grown more intolerant of old-style colonial interventionism were finally laid bare.
France decided to attack Egypt to help win a colonial war. Britain did so to consolidate the neo-colonial relationships with client Arab regimes that seemed pivotal to its imperial power. Both pretexts for fight over flight were empire derived, the former narrowly so, the latter an element in grand imperial strategy. Neither withstands close scrutiny. The Algerian conflict was internally generated and, while its international dimensions were crucial, its ultimate solution lay inside Algeria not outside it.119 The impending battle of Algiers could no more be avoided than it could be won on the shores of the Suez Canal. British intervention, meanwhile, significantly weakened its favoured Middle East partners, Iraq and Jordan above all. It undermined the region’s one pro-Western multilateral alliance—the Baghdad Pact.120 It made Britain ‘public enemy number one’ among the non-aligned states of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, increasingly ranged alongside one another in the UN General Assembly.121 And it opened the door for America to assume the primordial role among Western powers throughout the Arab world.
There were warning signs hidden amid the welter of diplomatic paperwork occasioned by the crisis that the operation might backfire. French diplomats in Cairo were never in any doubt that Nasser enjoyed overwhelming support from what we now term ‘the Arab street’.122 And the French military attaché in Washington also picked up the significance of a State Department conference with twenty Latin American state representatives on 7 August 1956. Talking informally and without Washington lobby correspondents present, Secretary of State Dulles blasted the British and French for provoking the crisis. It was folly to think that they could act with impunity.123 This was consistent with the ‘overriding lesson’ that General Sir Charles Keightley, commander of the Anglo-French task force, drew from the operation’s collapse: ‘world opinion is now an absolute principle of war and must be treated as such’.124
