On 25 January 1955 Jacques Soustelle, a renowned social anthropologist-turned-Gaullist politician, was appointed Algeria’s Governor-General.1 The rebellion launched by the Algerian National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale—FLN) was, by then, well into its third month. The organization behind it remained obscure nevertheless. Local administrators struggled to brief the novice governor about what or who the FLN was.2 The movement’s nine ‘historic leaders’ were relatively young, aged in their twenties and thirties. They emerged from the fringes of an older nationalist group, the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (whose French acronym was MTLD). Most senior FLN figures had humble origins in the east of the country. Some hailed from Berber families, others from Arab. Several took part in the abortive Sétif uprising of May 1945.3 Their earliest pronouncements were issued under the banner of a ‘Revolutionary Committee of Unity and Action’. To those inside the Algiers Governor’s Palace, the Committee’s statements seemed naïve and inflated. The call for Algerians to rise up against their colonial oppressors was even a little clichéd.4 But underestimating the FLN was a mistake.
The National Liberation Front may have been new but, although the police and security services were slow to make the connection, its organizers were ‘known to the authorities’, men like Amar Mostefa Benaouda, Lakhdar Ben Tobbal, and Abbane Ramdane.5 Their radicalization underlined the counter-productiveness of colonial repression in the decade after 1945. Some, like Abbane, had seen French retribution at first hand following the Sétif uprising. Thereafter, he, like others, became acclimatized to clandestine political activity as MTLD activists.6 Lengthy spells in prison were the norm. Indeed, shared experiences of incarceration linked the police crack-down against the MTLD’s paramilitary wing, the ‘Special Organization’, in early 1950, with the consolidation of the FLN’s inner core of regional (wilaya) commanders four years later.7 Still, for weeks after the initial rebel attacks on 1 November 1954, the authorities in Algiers attributed the disorder—wrongly—to one or more of Algeria’s established nationalist groups, even to a spill-over from neighbouring Tunisia where, for much of 1954, anti-colonial violence was more virulent.8
Map 12. The spread of rebel violence in Algeria, 1954–6.
What was incontrovertible was that attacks against government buildings, administrative personnel, and settlers were spreading far and wide, a trend clearly evident in Map 12. But precisely who was responsible? Struggling to piece together its intelligence about the small number of FLN activists, Soustelle’s administration pressed for more firepower.9 Rebel attacks were proliferating, particularly along Algeria’s rebellious eastern flank from the vertiginous slopes of the Aurès massif through the market centres of Sétif and Guèlma to the port of Philippeville, all of them centres of the last major challenge to French rule in May 1945.10 Furthermore, the case for additional troops would have been made anyway, regardless of the changes at the top in Algiers. Three days before Soustelle replaced him, Algeria’s outgoing Governor Roger Léonard discussed the worsening insecurity with his military commanders and regional prefects at the funeral for seven parachutists killed near the eastern city of Batna. Operation Véronique, a two-day sweep by 5,000 troops through the Aurès highlands, had yielded only twelve rebel ‘kills’. At least 3,500 villagers suspected of concealing or assisting local fighters were to be forcibly evicted.11 Viewed in hindsight, Véronique might have given pause for thought. A handful of ‘rebels’ eliminated; an entire local community antagonized: the grim escalatory dynamics of France’s fight for Algeria were falling into place.
Soustelle did not see things this way. For him there could be only one outcome to the developing Algerian War of Independence. Faith in his capacity to turn the situation around came naturally. A Protestant southerner with the twang of a Montpellier accent, the forty-two-year-old Soustelle had led a busy life. A distinguished résistant and erstwhile deputy for Lyon, he was also an expert on the Mayan and Aztec civilizations of Central America. True to his ethnographical training, Soustelle was convinced that complex societies could be understood through observational fieldwork.12 At first glance, the erudite Soustelle looked out of step with settler opinion.13 Events would prove otherwise. Soon after touching down in Algiers he sought to reassure the city’s European population. Whatever the drift towards decolonization in the neighbouring protectorate territories of Morocco and Tunisia, the French presence in Algeria was permanent: ‘France is at home here, or rather, Algeria and her inhabitants form an integral part of France, one and indivisible. All must know, here and elsewhere, that France will not leave Algeria any more than she will leave Provence and Brittany. Whatever happens, the destiny of Algeria is French.’14
Soustelle pledged to cement Franco-Algerian ties with welfare reforms, investment in infrastructure, housing projects, plus enhanced citizenship rights for the Muslim majority. This was merely to repeat the stock ‘official line’.15 It was Pierre Mendès France who, as prime minister when the Algerian rebellion began on 1 November 1954, selected Soustelle for the Governor’s position. Two months earlier, Muslim members of the regional council in Constantine, Algeria’s eastern-most département and an epicentre of nationalist militancy, congratulated the French premier for advocating a pull-out from neighbouring Tunisia. Mendès France, it appeared, knew that colonial flight—negotiations and orderly withdrawal—made sense.16 But on 12 November the prime minister disappointed them, reassuring his French parliamentary colleagues in the same terms that Soustelle would employ in Algiers: ‘We do not negotiate when it comes to defending the internal security of the nation and the integrity of the Republic. Between Algeria and the metropole, secession is unthinkable.’17 Adherence to the idea of Franco-Algerian indivisibility, its achievement encapsulated in policies collectively termed ‘integration’, precluded official talk of decolonization before the Fourth Republic collapsed amidst the Algerian protests of the May crisis in 1958.18
In France’s one substantial settler colony, a peculiarly republican form of colonial intransigence had descended into war. The Franco-Algerian conflict, perhaps the most vicious and scarring of any decolonization, illustrates the appalling consequences when fight and flight were eventually combined in an effort to protect a white settler minority. Acutely divisive in North Africa and France, Algeria’s dirtiest colonial war stands out as the most egregious example of a fight strategy running out of control.
This, inevitably, brings us to the war’s violence. Casualty numbers remain unconfirmed, but a conservative estimate suggests that at least 300,000 Algerians died in the eight years of conflict between 1954 and 1962 among a population of less than ten million.19 The great majority of these fatalities fell on Algeria’s Muslim population. We get a better sense of this within the official statistics for wartime ‘disappeared’, among which 13,296 of the 13,671 total were registered as ‘French Algerian Muslims’.20 More shocking still, a large proportion of these were killed by fellow Algerians, victims of the ‘compliance terror’ that characterized the FLN’s quest for dominance.21 Losses among the settler population were fewer, although still far greater than those suffered in any British colonial emergency of the period. Over the war’s first three years 1,315 European civilians were killed. A further 740 police personnel—technically, civilians—might be added to this total. Using the lower figure, exclusive of police losses, we arrive at one European civilian casualty for every three military deaths between 1954 and 1957.22 Telescoping forward to the conflict’s final months in 1961–2, the diehard French terrorists of the Organization de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) murdered in excess of 3,000 people, among them pro-government officials, schoolteachers, and other alleged ‘traitors’ to French Algeria. Many OAS victims were slain after the 1962 ceasefire.23
These shocking figures were mirrored in the behaviour of the French security forces, who also killed with minimal restraint. In what we now recognize as a common pattern in wars of decolonization, local insurgents were variously treated as criminal, terrorist, rebel, or traitor; never as recognized combatants with commensurate rights under international law. In Algeria especially, the familiar colonial axiom that disorder was an internal affair was elevated to official dogma. Codes of military conduct—in particular, Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Convention, devised to uphold human rights protections in ‘non-international armed conflict’—were consistently ignored and blatantly violated. The intimacy of the killing conducted by both sides made the circle of violence exceptionally vicious. The knife, the razor, and the home-made bomb, classic ‘weapons of the weak’ but capable of inflicting horrible injury, became trademarks of FLN violence, a violence meant to be publicized. Security force auxiliaries, informers, and other ‘traitors’ were dumped in market squares or on hamlet roadsides, their disfigured corpses arranged into grotesque poses that parodied their alleged crime. Gaping wounds from slit throats or multiple stabbings were a blunt display of FLN power. Often the victims were hacked down by new recruits to the FLN’s guerrilla force, a sanguinary initiation that tested the commitment of any waverers and ensured their complicity in the cycle of killings. Settler landowners, often entire farming families, were butchered by their farmhands; long-serving employees sometimes acting under duress, sometimes not. On rare but notorious occasions entire village populations were massacred for allegedly crossing the line—undiscernible to some, crystal-clear to FLN militants—that separated authentic nationalist loyalty from support for a party rival or co-existence with the colonial occupiers.
On the French side, security forces combined the impersonal killing of occasional military encounters with organized ‘national liberation army’ bands (rendered as ‘ALN’ in French) with the face-to-face violence of raids on homes, detainee executions, and the abuse of suspects. This culture of killing with impunity was not invisible to the French public; far from it. The popularity of ‘photo-journalism’ typified by Life magazine and Paris Match brought shocking montages of colonial violence to news-stands, waiting rooms, and lounge coffee tables as never before. French readers were invested with the power of judge and jury, invited to pass judgement on the ‘faceless FLN killers’ who slayed civilian innocents or on the ‘terrorists’ hunted down by the security forces. Only rarely were the polarities of such judgements reversed.
In December 1955 the magazine L’Express printed a sequence of photographs that clearly showed a gendarme in the village of Aïn Abid shooting an unarmed Algerian civilian in the back. The gendarme then calmly reloaded his rifle while his victim lay dying before him. The stills in question were from newsreel footage that captured the event from start to finish; a murder played out before the camera. This was no isolated act of rogue criminality. It was one of the thousands of reprisal killings that took place in eastern Algeria after the FLN’s first sustained massacre of European settlers earlier that year. Rock-solid evidence; or so one would have thought. Predictably enough, the editors at L’Express took the moral high ground. But they had an agenda: to embarrass Edgar Faure’s right-of-centre coalition before the impending general election. It didn’t work. A brief, pre-ballot media storm, then nothing.24 For French society, the reality of unjustifiable violence in Algeria was, as yet, no reality at all.
Gradually, painfully slowly, eye-witness accounts did make their mark back home. Raw recruits in some army units were shocked and traumatized by what they saw, let alone by what they were ordered to do. Some refused to be compromised. From mid 1956 onwards, a small but not insignificant minority, many of them Communist supporters, resisted the draft, disobeyed orders to use their weapons, or in other, lesser ways, subverted military discipline.25 But, for others, particular styles of killing, notably without leaving tell-tale marks of abuse, became a speciality. Professional torturers came to know their victims, probing their minds for information, probing their bodies to maximize pain.26 Often, the experience was highly sexualized. The army’s use of torture was predicated on a perverted intimacy in which a concentration on sexual acts, sexual organs and the domination of torturer over victim magnified the inequalities of power evident in colonial society and the ultra-masculine military culture of frontline units.27 Put in a torturer’s hands, mundane items—pliers, a beer bottle, the battery connections from a field telephone—became instruments of horror. Always illegal, torture became routine, so integral to army operations that, at the end of the conflict, the French state granted former army torturers immunity from prosecution.28
The laws of the Republic, when applied colonially, were never colour-blind. Nor was the law gender neutral, if anything offering fewer protections to women than to men.29 Algeria’s women faced multiple degradations within legal parameters and outside them. Their freedom of movement was curtailed. Their homes were invaded during army searches. Soldiers tampered with their clothing during roadside checks for hidden weapons or supplies.30 Captured women fighters, the ALN’s rural moudjahida and the FLN’s urban couriers, or fidayate, whose numbers grew rapidly from 1957, were more likely than their male counterparts to be spared summary execution. But army and police torturers were less scrupulous about sexual boundaries.31 Here, too, the humiliation of being forced to strip, a practice applied to detainees of both sexes, could be the prelude to far worse.32 Rape of women and men became commonplace inside police stations, army torture chambers, and isolated settlements along the war’s rural frontlines. Partly because fewer died in custody, women were liable to suffer multiple assaults.33 Nor did women escape FLN retribution. As symbols of national purity, guardians of the family, and educators of children, they faced punishment if they or their loved ones showed less than exemplary loyalty to the cause.34 Village women were expected to provide the shelter, to ferry the food and water that ALN guerrillas needed to survive.35 And this while successive waves of health workers, army medical teams, and other ‘women’s affairs’ specialists drew Algeria’s women under a government umbrella, making de facto collaboration harder to avoid.36 Arguments over the rights and duties of ‘French Muslim women’ (Françaises musulmanes—the colonial juridical designation for Algerian women) in everything from language usage and suitable dress to marriage and inheritance politicized all aspects of women’s existence.37 The fear or actuality of violence wove itself into the very fabric of Algerian domestic life as the war dragged on.
Was all of this unknown to the French public? Reports of security force torture surfaced within weeks of the rebellion’s outbreak. In January 1955 Claude Bourdet, editor of France Observateur, printed an article provocatively titled ‘Your Gestapo in Algeria’. The liberal Christian magazines L’Esprit and Témoignage Chrétien also exposed instances of the abuse and murder of detainees. Sympathetic human-rights lawyers and academics in France and Algiers took up individual detainees’ cases and began investigating the systematization of torture, rape, and summary execution as weapons of colonial war. Criticism also emanated from within the security forces, notably after conscripts went sent to Algeria from 1956. Harrowing accounts of deaths in custody, of repeated sexual violence, of soldiers coerced, corrupted, or brutalized into shooting FLN prisoners after capture, confronted the French public with the exact inversion of their recent experiences under Nazi occupation. For some, these reports induced a kind of intellectual torpor, a refusal to countenance the facts; for others, torture in Algeria became the decisive issue confronting French democracy in the 1950s. Earlier struggles of principle were invoked. For a tiny minority of French people active support for the FLN became a moral imperative akin to joining the resistance.38 For many others who cherished French republicanism as a humanitarian ideal the Dreyfus case came to mind. The unjust, racist treatment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of divulging military secrets to Germany in the 1890s, had mobilized a wide spectrum of republican opinion in opposition to military abuses conducted for reasons of state. Sixty years later the maltreatment of Algerians called French values into question once more.39 Still others, among whom de Gaulle was one, were never wedded to the republican conception of France as a nation built on shared values rather than common ethnicity. They were affronted by something else: the damage done to valued institutions and traditions; the army as repository of patriotic grandeur, the state as guarantor of basic rights.40
The tension between republican principles, ‘reasons of state’, and the cultural validity of ‘French Algeria’ also divided leading French intellectuals over a twenty-year period book-ended by the expulsion of the French Communists from government in 1947 and the cultural upheaval of May’68. Best known were the venomous clashes between prize-winning novelist Albert Camus, the settlers’ son raised in the working-class Algiers district of Belcourt, and Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist writer, epitome of Parisian sophistication, and voice of the anti-war hard left.41 Sartre and his philosopher-partner Simone de Beauvoir’s repudiation of colonialism as an outgrowth of market capitalism meshed with their attacks on France’s post-war republican establishment. Sartre and de Beauvoir reserved their strongest contempt for those like Camus: liberals who professed a commitment to assimilation between France and Algeria that, according to French literature’s golden couple, negated the structural causes of colonial racism. Sartre and de Beauvoir each spoke out passionately about the Algerian War, often in Les Temps Modernes, the journal they had co-founded in 1945.42 The café-bar intellectualism of the Paris left bank was an ocean away from Camus’ visceral attachment to the Algiers back-streets, and his genuine, if misguided, belief that the social divisions of Algeria’s colonial past could be transcended through inter-communal reconciliation. The crisis of conscience that Camus suffered over French repression in Algeria turned on the issue of violence—when and if it could be justified by either side.43
While Camus, himself a former resister, applauded the spirit of self-sacrifice of those driven to rebel by injustice, he condemned the FLN’s escalating terrorism just as he did the military’s use of torture. It was the immoral equivalence he drew between the two that angered other intellectual opponents of the war. For them, rebel attacks were a justifiable last resort whereas security-force killings were not.44 Strongest among these was Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique, who practised in French Algeria from 1952. Within a year he had written Peau Noir, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), a searing indictment of the ways in which colonial iniquity sapped the cultural integrity of the colonized. Where Camus viewed Algeria’s communal blood-letting as a downward spiral of atrocity, Fanon defended killings by the FLN as the reclamation of Algerian identity through violence.45
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu joined the criticism of Sartre, Fanon, and others who romanticized the Algerian rebellion as a popular revolution.46 Bourdieu’s theories about the cultural factors that enable groups and individuals to dominate one another built on fieldwork he conducted at the war’s height among Berber peasant communities in Kabylia, a mountainous northern region profoundly disrupted by the conflict. Bourdieu’s ethno-graphic vantage point left him pessimistic about the war’s emancipatory potential.47 Algeria’s peasantry was ‘uprooted’ from its moral economy, traditional cultural practices, including forms of land tenure, inheritance, and extended family solidarity undermined by dispossession and poverty.48 He had a point. Although France was investing heavily in Algeria, development funding failed to curb the ethnic inequalities typified by soaring Algerian unemployment and the growth of shanty towns.49 145,000 Algerian Muslims did enter industrial employment between 1948 and 1956, but this number was dwarfed by Algeria’s rising population, which climbed from 8,811,100 in 1955 to 9.875,000 in 1960.50 Bourdieu’s subsequent fieldwork inside the massive army resettlement camps to which destitute Algerians from rural conflict zones were forcibly relocated in the war’s latter stages left him even more convinced that Algerian society was already despoiled.51
Bourdieu’s scholarly pessimism did not reflect how Algeria’s European population viewed the society around them. In the words of settler poet Gabriel Audisio, Algeria was the sole colony in which ‘the creation of “France” really succeeded’. It was made French, not by some privileged ‘plantocracy’, typical of an older, discredited imperialism, but by workaday folk from France and other Mediterranean countries. There were almost one million white European residents in Algeria when the war began; seventy-nine per cent were Algerian born. Many had family connections with Spain, Malta, or Italy, but not in mainland France. The majority were urbanites—industrial workers, low-ranking civil servants, shopkeepers, and artisans; poor to middling by French standards.52 Stories of grand settler estates and Algerian rural misery were almost as remote to them as they were to Parisians. It was easy to depict these pieds noirs (literally, ‘black feet’) as obstinate in their racism, emotive in their reading of the war’s deeper causes. Racist bigotry there was, yet instances of casual discrimination were matched by enduring friendships across communal divides in the languid heat of Algiers.53
Tragically, the logic of civil conflict made such inter-ethnic mixing harder to sustain.54 Algeria’s cycle of urban killings, in particular, transformed cultural interchange.55 Police arrested Rosa Serrano, a settler of Spanish origin, because she supported the outlawed Algerian Communist Party. Released pending her trial, she recalled that French neighbours and childhood friends in the Bab el-Oued district of Algiers neither spoke to her, nor made eye contact, whereas local Algerians embraced her, wishing her well. Later, these same settler neighbours began a campaign of intimidation against her.56 Part of the war’s disturbing geometry was that while Algerian Muslims faced worsening bloodletting as the FLN imposed its dominance, so, too, the settler community and their military protectors turned on one another as victory slipped from their grasp.57 Patricia Lorcin frames it nicely: ‘The socio-political violence of the colonial era was vertical being restricted largely to conflict between the dominant French and the subordinated Algerians. During the war, however, it was vertical and horizontal. In addition to fighting each other, the French and the Algerians had to contend with internecine struggles that bordered on civil war.’58
There were settlers of a different sort. And they added another layer of complication to the fight or flight choice. These were migrants who moved in the opposite direction from North Africa to France. They, too, found themselves in the grip of a civil war, one waged on the poor margins of France’s industrial cities. Thousands of Algerian immigrants, the majority, single working men, had lived in Paris, Marseilles, Lille, and elsewhere since the First World War. Some made the northward crossing of the Mediterranean for good. Others were temporary workers whose remittances to families helped sustain rural communities with strong traditions of economic migration in regions like Kabylia, Algeria’s Berber heartland. Several factors contributed to the spatial segregation of these immigrant communities from surrounding French society. The most obvious was the relative poverty of most North African workers. Others included tight official screening and persistent discrimination in the allocation of social housing.59 Perhaps most compelling was the understandable tendency among the immigrants themselves to cluster together. The bidonvilles [so-called because of the large gas bottles or ‘bidons’ favoured by residents to provide affordable fuel for cooking] which mushroomed on the margins of Paris and Marseilles typified these processes in action. ‘Huts,’ notes the historian Neil MacMaster, ‘were constructed of wood, corrugated iron, tarred felt, and breezeblocks, and had no basic services like running water, electricity or sewerage.’ Aside from poor sanitation, ‘the greatest risk to the inhabitants, a source of continuous anxiety, was from fire and asphyxiation due to primitive stoves.’ By 1955 at least 4,300 Algerians, around half of the total in the Paris commune of Nanterre, lived in such conditions. By the time the war ended in 1962 Nanterre’s bidonville housed close on 7,000.60
Ghettoized, confined to low-paid employment and stringently policed, by the early 1950s the Algerians of the northern Paris banlieues seethed with resentment. Many were ‘Messalists’, followers of Messali Hadj’s Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (the MTLD in French), a party boasting a thirty-year history of opposition to French rule in Algeria. But by 1953 the MTLD was splitting. Its internal fault-lines exposed ideological and generational shifts in Algerian nationalism that pitched the Messalists into self-destructive conflict with their offshoot, the FLN.61 On 14 July 1953, the horrors of this intra-Algerian civil war—one in which an estimated 8,000 Algerian immigrants died in internecine fighting in mainland French cities between 1955 and 1962—lay in the future.62 Messalist organizers were determined to use the 1953 Bastille Day commemoration to protest at their leader’s imprisonment and the colonial subjugation that his incarceration signified.
The marchers first assembled into neat columns, then set out for the Place de la Bastille. Few got there. Scuffles broke out with parachutists on leave from the war in Indochina drinking in a roadside café. The police called for back-up from nearby city stations at Charonne and Bel Air. In what would be a recurrent feature of Paris policing during the Algerian conflict, the line between corralling demonstrators, aggressive riot control, and the targeted killing of protesters evaporated. Some Algerians struck out with placards and broken street furniture once the police moved in to shut down the march. Several policemen drew their side-arms. Multiple shots were fired. By the early evening of an unusually rainy 14 July seven demonstrators lay dead amidst the puddles between the Place de la Nation and the Bastille monument. At least forty more had gunshot wounds. Some of the injured avoided hospital treatment for fear of arrest, making it harder to verify casualty numbers. The subsequent growth of discrete police units to monitor Maghreb immigrants brought repressive practices refined in colonial Algeria to the epicentre of the Republic.63
The fact that Algeria’s colonial war spilled over into mainland France has helped convince historians of its singularity. Was the Algerian case really so different? Several long-term processes entrenched the privileges of European settler communities within African colonial societies. On the economic side, the extractive nature of colonial economies and the introduction of monetary taxes helped turn Africans into wage workers, often dependent on European-owned concerns to provide employment. Typically associated with industries like mining where company control of African labour was especially rigorous, this trend was equally evident in the countryside where land seizures and the introduction of large-scale, estate-type farming consolidated the racial hierarchies of settler power. On the juridical side, colonial civil law became an instrument to legitimize settler property-holding and European commercial primacy, while criminal law imposed differential scales of punishment for whites and non-whites. Racially-codified restrictions on freedom of movement and access to public space underpinned systems of segregation that, to be sure, were more vigorously enforced in some places than others, but which were never entirely absent from Africa’s settler colonies.64 Government legislation meanwhile restricted access to citizenship, ostensibly by non-racial criteria such as education, religious attachment, or property ownership. The effect, deliberate but fervently denied, was to align political rights and economic opportunity with those of white skin.65
Little wonder that, during the 1950s and 1960s, the most intransigent ultra-nationalism in French and British Africa emanated from settler communities determined to resist majority rule.66 These were the societies where the implications of moving from the rights attached to an ethnically-based national identity towards an inclusive and racially-neutral civic nationalism provoked the bitterest argument. Often, these disputes culminated in heightened inter-ethnic violence as the prelude to imperial withdrawal.67 Yet, as we have seen, viewing Algeria’s European residents as politically united, culturally homogeneous, or singularly affluent does them a disservice. The large proportion of what in British colonial parlance were known as ‘poor whites’ among Algeria’s pieds noirs should unsettle our understanding of settler lives, which come loaded with preconceptions about privileged communities at one remove from the local populations surrounding them. A brief digression to colonial Kenya proves the point. The experiences of its poor whites as revealed in Kenya colony’s legal and medical records expose the thinnest of lines separating successful farming or business ventures from foreclosure, the idealized settler family from dysfunctional relationships marred by domestic violence and alcoholism.68 Comparable encounters with poverty, drink, and unhappiness figured as prominently in Algerian settler lives.
Returning now to the politics of the Algerian conflict, the situation changed fundamentally a year after Governor Soustelle’s arrival in Algiers. Critical to that change was the question of who should replace him. A darling of the settlers, Soustelle was out of step with the Socialist Party that won France’s general elections in January 1956. Determined to reward a domestic electorate impatient for a decisive Algerian breakthrough, the new prime minister, Guy Mollet, called on the former Free French General Georges Catroux to take Soustelle’s place. To ensure that Catroux could push ahead with constitutional reforms and economic redistribution without being derailed by the settler-dominated Algiers Assembly or the equally intransigent Federation of Algerian Mayors, Mollet assigned him enhanced powers as ‘Resident Minister’. This welcome reorientation in policy was not to last.
On 6 February 1956, a day after announcing his government’s legislative plans in the National Assembly, Mollet flew to Algiers to prepare the ground for Catroux. Hours later he was barricaded inside the Governor’s Palace, his suit smeared with rotten tomatoes and clods of earth after a bruising encounter with Soustelle’s disgruntled supporters. As we saw in Chapter 6, the demonstrators were a loose coalition that included leading settler politicians, mayors, and media figures, Pierre Lagaillarde’s Student Action Committee, and ultra-rightist followers of Pierre Poujade’s small traders’ movement.69 Afraid that the new government was on the point of selling out to the FLN, they shut down the capital before venting their anger on Mollet himself. The prime minister’s first full day in office culminated in a riot, decisive evidence of settler power in Algiers. Catroux tendered his resignation without ever taking up his post, leaving Mollet to fly home with little prospect of imposing a liberal alternative in defiance of settler wishes.70
The left-leaning Republican Front coalition had begun its eighteen months in office with a crushing about-turn in Algeria. Without entirely abandoning its reform proposals or even exploratory talks with FLN intermediaries, Mollet’s government embarked upon a massive escalation in the war.71 What linked these seeming opposites was French parliamentary approval of extended Algerian ‘special powers’. Voted on 12 March 1956, the special powers combined rule by decree with extended martial law. Algeria’s resident minister could implement constitutional changes, reorganize Algerian local government, and assign development funding by fiat.72 The army acquired full police powers. These were backed up by the promise of huge reinforcements as national servicemen lost their previous exemption from serving in colonial conflicts.73 Algeria was careening towards dirty war.
For a brief moment, it all seemed quite sensible. Catroux’s newly-designated replacement, Robert Lacoste, was a straight-talking former industrial arbitrator willing to surrender his position as Finance Minister to push ahead with the reform plans. Operation Valmy, its title invoking the French revolutionary army’s defeat of the Prussians in September 1792, heralded the largest French army deployment overseas since the age of Napoleon. Troop numbers nudged half a million by December.74
Three fatal flaws lurked within this strategy of top-down reform and military saturation, however. First was the admission, implicit in the Special Powers vote, that governmental restructuring of Algerian society could not be achieved through consent. Second was that sending teenage conscripts to Algeria invested workmates, classmates, girlfriends, and, above all, parents with a stake in events across the Mediterranean.75 Third, the failure to disconnect dialogue from violence; indeed, the pursuit of an alternate logic that imposing military order was a prerequisite to reform, made matters far worse for Algerians.76 Bizarre as it may seem, in the four years that separated Mollet’s 1956 election from the start of formal negotiations with the FLN’s ‘provisional government of the Algerian Republic’, successive French administrations justified heightened restrictions, collective punishments, and forced population removal as prerequisites to talks and eventual peace. Algeria, then, was another instance in which efforts to combine fight with flight went disastrously wrong for the country’s colonial rulers.
To understand why Mollet’s government chose to do what an equally ill-fated American President, Lyndon Johnson, would do nine years later in Vietnam: namely, to authorize a massive expansion in an anti-insurgent war, to commit conscripts to the fight, and to blur the line between population control and human rights abuses, we need to consider three factors.77 One is the political setting in which strategic decisions were made in Paris and Algiers. Another is the wider international context in which the Algerian War was fought. Finally are the changing understandings of the war’s nature and purpose among the French and Algerian populations, Muslim and European alike. These three factors folded together as the war expanded in the months before the Socialists came to power.
1955 had witnessed a steady growth in Algerian disorder. Even though the largest ALN guerrilla bands numbered perhaps 500, their principal locales were in Algeria’s mountainous interior, regions where cultural resistance to colonial demands was strongest and French authority commensurately weak. The ALN’s strict internal discipline drew on longer traditions of communal solidarity against French exaction.78 The result was an enemy that remained invisible most of the time. Soustelle’s administration responded by imposing state of emergency restrictions on 6 April. Curfews and other restrictions on freedom of movement were, at first, confined to so-called zones d’urgence, those areas worst affected by FLN violence: much of upland Kabylia, the Aurès-Nementchas highlands, and the eastern Constantinois region more generally.79 Months later a broader swathe of Algeria’s northern coastal belt stretching southwards towards the colony’s military-administered Saharan territory was similarly locked down. Algerian local government, civilian prefects at its apex, village djemaa assemblies at its base, was co-opted to the army’s divisional commands, a process consolidated when Algeria’s three départements were sub-divided into twelve, smaller units in June 1956. Martial law had collapsed the boundaries between civil administration and army rule, crushing basic safeguards of individual rights along the way.80
Algerian political meetings were prohibited. In some places, Chambers of Commerce and Agriculture, even religious services, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish, were suspended. The FLN responded in kind. Algerians known to be working for the administration in any capacity became prime targets for FLN retribution. Army checkpoints, curfews and police round-ups, night-time disappearances and FLN bombings and killings of alleged ‘collaborators’, all disrupted economic activity, fractured community loyalties, and sent fear creeping into family homes, Algerian and European alike. Ten years after the 1945 Sétif uprising, in the market towns of eastern Algeria inter-communal distrust bubbled back to the surface. Once again, funerals for murdered settlers became flashpoints for violence. Fearful that anyone in Muslim dress might be lynched, police advised Algerian bystanders to keep off the streets as cortèges passed by. There was talk of defunct ultra-rightist groups, the Action Française, and the Parti Populaire Français, being resurrected. Vigilante death squads also reappeared. As much in desperation as in hope, a group of Algerian councilmen lined up with Constantine Prefect Pierre Dupuch on 9 July to plead for calm, inter-faith dialogue, and respect for the emergency laws.81 It was to no avail.
During seventy-two hours beginning at midday on Saturday 20 August 1955 FLN supporters in the towns and villages decimated by French repression of the Sétif uprising took their revenge. From the port of Philippeville to the market town of Guèlma, settler families, members of the security forces, and alleged Algerian collaborators were hacked to death. 171 Europeans were killed. They included ten children who were among the thirty-seven victims hunted down in the worst single episode of violence at the El-Halia mining compound outside Philippeville.82 Although the weapons used—farm implements, knives, clubs—were primitive, this was neither a simple pay-back nor a spontaneous peasant jacquerie. Coordinated by Lakhdar Ben Tobbal and Zighoud Youcef, ALN leaders in northern Constantine, this was terrorism as provocation. Intended, in part, to divert army resources, in part, to demonstrate the FLN’s capacity to mobilize popular support, the Constantine massacres mocked official insistence that a silent Algerian majority wanted the French to remain.83 In this sense, the massacres not only replayed the events of 1945 but formed part of a cycle of violence the motor for which was the earlier imposition of martial law. With numerous forms of public dissent already liable to capital punishment, the military authorities made no pretence of restraint as order was re-imposed. As was the case with the 1945 uprising after which Algerian deaths ran into several thousands, security-force killing was industrial in scale. Algerians in the neighbourhood of El-Halia were shot without trial; suspects in Philippeville were executed en masse on the town’s football pitch. Settler vigilantism, so much a feature of the reprisal killings in 1945, resumed.84 Uneasy Franco-Algerian co-habitation in north-eastern Algeria unravelled in a matter of weeks.
In 1955, as in 1945, the shared bias of colonial bureaucracy, military tribunals, and prosecuting magistrates contributed mightily to this breakdown. The official record of the 1945 Sétif uprising, largely derived from police reports and the colonial gendarmerie, painted a lurid picture of attacks on settlers. Missing from archival accounts or later trial documents are any comparable official records revealing how Algerians viewed the more widespread violence done to them.85 The imbalance reflected long-practised colonial skills in hiding the details of state repression. Euphemistic language, clerical imprecision or, quite literally, burying evidence by hurriedly interring victims in mass graves, set terrible precedents for the many forms of rhetorical elision and archival concealment, and the ‘disappearing’ of victims used to mask the murder or torture of detainees during the Algerian War.86
Unsurprisingly, French security analysts had no truck with the view that the original Algerian violence stemmed from maltreatment and material hardship. To have done so would have conferred a measure of rationality, even defensibility, on these uprisings ten years apart.87 The colonial authorities instead wanted things both ways: the Sétif rebellion and the Constantine massacres were political violence, but of a sort that only immature and innately dangerous individuals could perpetrate. In plain terms, it was the work of criminally-misguided colonial subjects, not fully-formed citizens.88 But how should we, in turn, understand the scale of French repressive violence that began in May 1945, was resumed in August 1955, and continued with varying intensity until 1962? Can it, or should it, be rationalized? Was it simply a case of meeting fire with firestorm? As historian James McDougall suggests, ‘any assessment of collective colonial violence should begin with the social and political conditions in which such practices arose’.89 It was exactly this connection—between the violence produced by an exclusionary colonial system that set an ethnic minority over an indigenous majority—which the French authorities refused to make.90
Others were less reticent. Arab states, with Egypt leading the charge, condemned the ferocity of the French clampdown in August 1955. The pro-Western Iraqi and Yemeni governments appealed to Britain and the US to help end the killings.91 Even Konrad Adenauer’s West German administration described the army’s retribution as a ‘blood bath’.92 France was losing friends over a colonial war that was rapidly acquiring global dimensions. Britain’s Conservative government, by contrast, remained conspicuously silent. Stuck inside their own colonial glass-houses, British observers were reluctant to throw accusatory stones. Brigadier A.C.F. Jackson, military attaché in Paris, played down press reports of army atrocities in Algeria. For him, the tragedy was that it took the 20 August massacres before ministers in Paris woke up to the FLN threat and began ‘supporting’ their troops as they should have from the beginning.93 Among soldiers ‘tried beyond the reasonable restraints of military discipline’ by a combination of political neglect at home and horrific terrorist violence in the field, army atrocities were remarkably scarce.94 Jackson’s case was soon disproved. Better informed US consuls in North Africa indicated a death toll of between six to eight thousand Algerian civilians during the punitive operations mounted in and around Philippeville during August and September 1955.95
At the local level, the Constantine massacres turned the constant hiss of settler complaint about inadequate security force protection into a cacophonous drone. Its clamour reached Paris thanks to outraged settler parliamentarians in the National Assembly.96 Pierre Dupuch, the beleaguered Prefect in Constantine, struggled vainly to keep cross-community relations alive amidst the poisonous atmosphere of recrimination and vigilantism. Having failed to prevent the massacres, he was too discredited to make any impact.97 His long-term replacement would be Maurice Papon, the former Vichy official convicted for crimes against humanity in the 1990s for his role in sending thousands of French Jews to Auschwitz. Granted extended powers by Mollet’s government as one of Algeria’s new ‘super-prefects’ or ‘IGAME’ (Inspecteur-général de l’administration en mission extraordinaire) Papon was no stranger to Constantine. He had reorganized the region’s police and gendarmerie forces in the aftermath of Sétif, work that secured his selection as the region’s prefect between 1949 and 1951.98 Less than five years later, he was back coordinating another ‘pacification’ of Algeria’s rebellious east.
Determined to sever the links between ALN fighters and the surrounding population, Papon acted with little constraint. Torture centres became busier; forced population removal more extensive.99 Speaking the language of revolutionary warfare in vogue within the army’s Fifth Bureau psychological warfare division, Papon insisted that the Algerian conflict was a battle of wills. People’s compliance would be secured by convincing them that the security forces would go further than the FLN to achieve their objectives. Papon repeated his dictum time and again: through force came protection; from protection flowed confidence.100 This was the ‘order before reform’ rationale of colonial government in Mollet-era Algeria.
Papon’s appointment indicated something else as well. The Constantine attacks created the permissive environment necessary for the expansion of the emergency powers imposed by Edgar Faure’s governing coalition during 1955. In the months that followed the French general election in January 1956, parliamentary criticism of Mollet’s escalation strategy was nugatory. To the shock of its grass-roots activists, even the French Communist Party leadership endorsed the Special Powers vote, earning itself lasting FLN derision.101 In July 1956 a group of opposition deputies led by former Finance Minister Pierre Pflimlin toured Algeria’s army districts. They were shocked to discover their local supporters so terrified of FLN retribution that they barricaded themselves in their homes at night. What did the deputies conclude? That total military pacification was the essential prelude to national elections and the resumption of socio-economic reform.102 As if reading from the script of the government’s Algerian policy, Pflimlin’s colleagues repeated the unconvincing official mantra that ordinary Algerians, once freed to vote in secure conditions, would desert the FLN for moderate, pro-French alternatives.103 This was a pipe-dream.
Algeria’s discriminatory voting system and years of government vote rigging—known among colonial bureaucrats as élections à l’algérienne—ensured derisory participation long before the FLN announced a boycott of local and national elections in 1955.104 Algeria’s electoral practices were fairly typical of white minority-ruled colonies in which Europeans selected representatives to one (usually more influential) assembly, while the local majority population voted for a second, largely decorous assembly packed with compliant yes men—Beni Oui Ouis in the parlance of French Algeria. Once FLN enforcers began slicing off the lips and noses of those Algerians who defied its boycotts of French wine and tobacco, even fewer people were willing to venture into polling stations.105
Although it was the Algerian rebellion that propelled Mollet’s government into the Suez collusion, few French politicians were prepared to question the wisdom of this ever-widening war. As we saw in Chapter 6, on 18 May 1956 an ALN unit ambushed a patrol of newly-arrived reservists near the Palestro gorge, a beauty-spot south-east of Algiers. Twenty soldiers were killed. The loss of family men and youngsters just starting out in life sent to their deaths by the requirements of national service intensified public debate about what was at stake in Algeria and about military obligation more generally.106 Leading intellectuals, including Sartre, the pioneer surrealist André Breton, and acclaimed writer François Mauriac, signed up to a ‘Committee opposed to the sending of conscripts to North Africa’.107 Others, including a Catholic Cardinal, several Sorbonne professors, and Paul Rivet, France’s premier ethnographer, came out in support of Mollet’s policies.108 Inside the National Assembly, there were some dissenting Socialists—former minister André Philip, Algiers-born colonial specialist Alain Savary, and Young Socialist leader Michel Rocard. But most mainstream politicians toed the official line.109 At street level, public anger over the Palestro ambush added impulse to the protests at railway stations, ports of embarkation, and other conscript assembly points that began in the wake of the special powers vote. Seventy-seven such demonstrations were recorded in thirty-six of France’s ninety départements between April and the end of June 1956. Communist Party militants, the rail and dockworkers’ unions, and other anti-war activists talked of mobilizing the public against Mollet’s government and the Fourth Republic. This was to misunderstand what was taking place. The protesters’ ranks were not comprised of ideological fellow-travellers but of family members and friends appalled that their loved ones were being sent to fight such a wretched cause.110
Cinema newsreels, early television reports, and radio coverage of the war were still relatively upbeat, but the press much less so. Le Monde, the magazines France Observateur and L’Express, as well as the progressive journals Esprit and Les Temps Modernes, became sharply critical of the war and especially the way it was being fought.111 Here, the newspapers were reacting to something else. Personal accounts of village massacres and of army torture turned from a trickle into a flood during the two years that separated the Palestro ambush from the Fourth Republic’s demise in the May crisis of 1958. Particularly damaging was La question, the account by Henri Alleg, Communist editor of the left-wing daily Alger Républicain, of his experiences under torture by army parachutists during the battle of Algiers in 1957. It caused a media storm in France and overseas that lasted long after its February 1958 publication.112
Central to the disconnection between French politicians and public was the underlying popular belief that the governing parties that had dominated the Fourth Republic’s imperial policy-making since 1946 had no idea how to arrest France’s slide deeper into the Algerian morass. Leading figures in the ruling Socialist and Radical parties, as well as participants in previous coalition administrations from the MRP and the UDSR, were increasingly tarred with the same brush. From the Communist left to the Gaullist right flowed accusations that ministers, wedded to the rhetoric of order before reform, of fight before flight, were playing fast and loose with French lives, money, and international reputation. Still, Mollet’s government refused to change course.
Algeria had become a war of political attrition, a slow, grinding conflict punctuated by shocks and scandal.113 But, as we shall see in the next chapter, there were those willing to risk negotiations. To understand this impending change of political direction, we need briefly to turn our attention to the extraneous influences on the Franco-Algerian conflict.
The skies over the Mediterranean witnessed some revealing airborne encounters during the autumn of 1956. We saw in Chapter 6 how a Paris governmental clique, working in conjunction with military commanders in North Africa, engineered the hijacking of the aircraft carrying senior members of the FLN executive on 22 October. A month earlier an older Algerian nationalist figure, Ferhat Abbas, for years held up in France as a ‘moderate’ negotiating partner, had met an unnamed British contact aboard a flight between Geneva and Milan. Abbas told the Briton that only the FLN could deliver Algeria’s freedom. His decision to endorse his former rivals was old news by then. More interesting was his description of the ALN’s numerous overseas backers. Nasser’s Egypt was not even first among them.114 Franco’s Spain, hostile to French policy in Morocco, was providing essential small arms.115 And Eastern bloc regimes were expected to send far more. There was, it seemed, more than a kernel of truth in the French army’s insistence that Algeria was a Cold War frontline. It was a viewpoint graphically illustrated in posters, such as the one reproduced below, depicting the FLN as mere puppets of the Soviet Union and the Arab League.
Three weeks after Abbas’ revelations a French aircraft ferried nine British MPs on an Algerian observation tour. Their visit was organized by the Algiers authorities to convince international observers of the progress being made by civil and military administrators on the ground. Taken to see urban housing projects, rural health centres, and a team of the army’s elite ‘special administrative section’ (or ‘SAS’) local government workers, the MPs finished their inspection with a ‘frank, impressive’ discussion with the IGAME, Maurice Papon. He reassured them that, thanks to this nuts-and-bolts approach to development, peace was returning to the eastern regions worst affected by the August 1955 massacres.116
These episodes pointed to a discernible trend. The Algerian War of Independence was being internationalized, coming to symbolize the rights and wrongs of colonialism in the eyes of the world. Algerian nationalists found ideological inspiration in numerous foreign sources, including Nasser’s call for pan-Arab solidarity, Kwame Nkrumah’s vision of pan-African unity, and the socialist non-alignment perfected by the Yugoslav premier, Tito.117 Young Algerian fighters inspired by Vietnam’s against-the-odds struggle also drew succour from the successes of their brethren in Morocco and Tunisia to the consternation of police personnel who fretted about the traffic of people, weapons, and ideas across Algeria’s land frontiers.118 Algeria’s ulama clerics, as well as the devout within FLN ranks, looked to fellow Islamists, notably Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Qur’anic scholars at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.119
Figure 14. ‘Ne soyons pas aveugles!’ (‘Don’t be blind!’), 18 April 1956. The quotation from the ALN executive committee reads: ‘Terror isn’t enough. We need armed struggle akin to that in the Aurès everywhere. It a matter of the relative strength of forces and France will have to give way.’
Source: SHD-DAT, 1H2595/D2, DSTT, 5ème Bureau poster.
Internationalization involved more than learning lessons from foreign example, however. As early as December 1948 Hocine Aït Ahmed, one of the FLN’s original nine leaders who became the FLN’s principal spokesperson in the USA and elsewhere, had urged the MTLD’s central committee to greater diplomatic efforts to win friends, sympathy, and influence overseas. Citing examples from Ireland’s Easter Rising to Mao’s imminent victory in China, he defined ‘people’s war’ as inherently transnational—part of a universal struggle against injustice that transcended international politics. Aït Ahmed’s rhetorical flourishes registered with his fellow revolutionaries.120 In August 1954 Messali Hadj, elder statesman of militant Algerian nationalism and still MTLD leader, instructed his party executive to devise a strategy for the internationalization of the Algerian conflict through the United Nations. And internationalization of the Algerian crisis was the primary objectif extérieur outlined in the FLN’s first proclamation, issued at the rebellion’s outbreak. Two months later the Saudi delegation raised the Algerian situation with the Security Council, the first of numerous attempts to place France in the dock at the UN.121
After a hesitant start that reflected the divisions between the FLN’s internal and external leadership, the movement became an adept practitioner of this transnational battle for foreign hearts, minds, money, and guns. Aside from petitioning the UN, relief agencies like the Red Cross were assiduously cultivated, further isolating the colonial authorities at home and abroad.122 The FLN’s external leadership, a de facto government-in-waiting that operated principally from Cairo and Tunis, coordinated press, radio, and other publicity campaigns. Their propagandist output chimed with the cycle of UN General Assembly sessions and other multilateral gatherings as diverse as the Socialist International, the World Council of Churches, and the NATO command. Little by little, the war sucked in other states, foreign sympathizers, charities, and social commentators whose interest in colonial problems was not evident hitherto.123 By 1957 high-profile figures from the Indian premier Nehru to the ANC leader Nelson Mandela, and a young Massachusetts Senator, John F. Kennedy, had condemned French actions in Algeria.124 Nor did FLN propaganda neglect its home audience. Transistor radios, omnipresent in Algerian rural homes, spread the word of revolution. Calls to arms, stirring accounts of ALN victories, and reminders about boycotts were interspersed with news from across the Arab world and the latest tunes from popular Maghreb singers.125
Sensitivity to foreign opinion also shaped the war’s violence. From the Constantine massacres onwards, the timing of ALN offensives, bombings, and urban demonstrations were calculated to maximize international impact.126 The French army found itself disarmed by this kind of propaganda war. Indeed, the greater its military success against ALN bands and the FLN’s urban networks, the more oppressive it appeared to outsiders. Faced with this dilemma, the authorities in French Algeria (and British Kenya) resorted instead to what historian Fabian Klose terms the ‘humanitarian double standard’. Critical of rights abuses in the Communist world, they insisted that purely ‘domestic’ colonial problems escaped the supposedly global protections of international human rights law.127
Such defiance of international opinion became harder to sustain as dissentient Algerian voices reached a global audience. Assured of the support of Eastern bloc countries and non-aligned states from Asia and Latin America, FLN lobbyists registered additional successes with the UN General Assembly as newly-independent African countries gained admission from 1957 onwards. French diplomatic efforts to confine UN scrutiny of the Algerian situation to backroom committees peaked between 1955 and 1957.128 UN delegations in New York, the State Department in Washington, prominent US media commentators, and the ‘opinion-forming’ newspapers of America’s major cities were all sent Algiers government publications highlighting levels of French investment, improving welfare, and educational provision. Gruesome booklets with pictures of the FLN’s civilian victims prominently displayed were also dispatched as evidence of the true complexion of Algerian nationalism (see figure below).
For all that, it was French, not FLN, misdeeds that resonated strongest. Worsening army abuses made French denials that a war was going on seem laughable. The guillotining of FLN prisoners in Algiers tarnished France’s image as a cradle of democracy. The French legal system became tainted. With sometimes minimal consideration, prosecutors sanctioned some 1,500 capital sentences. Almost 200 were carried out, a fraction of the number of extra-judicial killings by the army.129 Most devastating were the testimonies of torture victims and their lawyers. There was no more powerful ammunition to mobilize public sympathy overseas. The abuses suffered by two fidayate detainees, each condemned to be guillotined for their role in the FLN’s urban bombing campaign, drew unprecedented international attention. Djamila Bouhired’s trial was conducted in July 1957 at the height of the ‘battle for Algiers’ between the city’s FLN cells and General Jacques Massu’s 10th Parachute Division. Her unstinting defence of her actions stimulated the production of a booklet, Pour Djamila Bourhired, a hit Egyptian film, Djamila l’Algérienne, and a string of popular songs broadcast across North Africa.130 Sixty-five British Labour Party MPs signed a petition describing her trial as a travesty of ‘western standards’ of justice.131 With international pressure mounting, Bouhired’s death sentence was commuted.
The torture and rape of Djamila Boupacha, another female detainee arrested alongside Bouhired, attracted even greater hostile international attention.132 Accused of planting a bomb at Algiers University, Boupacha’s fortitude in the face of her torturers inspired a portrait by Picasso. The image featured in a book written by her lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, to which Simone de Beauvoir, Boupacha’s pre-eminent French defender, contributed.133 Petitions demanding her reprieve were organized from Latin America to India, although only after the war ended was she amnestied.134 The quest for global sympathy did not mean that the FLN was about to become less ruthless. Senior leaders led by Abbane Ramdane sensed that Mollet’s government, reeling from humiliation in Egypt and losing domestic support for its ‘order before reform’ approach, could be pushed beyond the brink, either into defeat or international isolation. At the start of 1957 the campaign of city bombings and targeted assassinations was intensified. The shift towards urban terrorism transformed the war’s image irrevocably.
Figure 15. One of the least gruesome images from a 1957 Algiers government booklet, Mélouza et Wagram accusent, showing Berber women grieving over children’s corpses after a village massacre carried out in reprisal for villagers’ support of the FLN’s rival, the MNA.
Note: The propaganda uses to which the French authorities put the Mélouza massacre are discussed in Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 165–79.
Algeria’s FLN was one of three national liberation movements whose resort to terrorism achieved devastating results. Along with the Jewish Irgun Zwai Le’umi (Irgun), which targeted British security forces in the last years of the Palestine Mandate, and the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA), the FLN applied merciless violence to achieve four objectives. First was to enforce popular compliance, to eliminate party rivals, and to sap the will of administrators, settlers, and the French public to resist them. These eliminations advanced the second objective: building a disciplined party apparatus to take on the mantle of local government. The FLN, by forming a state within a state inside its ‘liberated zones’, made the transition to independence commensurate with its assumption of power.
Linked to the construction of the institutional fabric of a functioning state was the third strategy—destabilization of the hubs of French colonial rule: Algeria’s coastal cities. The FLN learnt from Vietminh tactics of urban bombings, extortive taxation from businesses, boycotts, civilian intelligence-gathering, and courier work. But the impact of colonial warfare on the urban demography of Vietnam and Algeria was markedly different. After 1946 the Vietnamese urban population shrank, especially in Hanoi. Residents fled the cities to find shelter with families in the countryside or to join the Vietminh. In Algeria, by contrast, the urban population mushroomed, the fastest expansion occurring within the bidonvilles on city fringes. In neither case could France win. Whether the cities emptied or overflowed, the net result was the same: growing popular conviction that the security forces were losing control of the situation.135
Fourth and finally was the FLN’s readiness to defend its right to resist colonialism by all means necessary. For all its brutality at home, the FLN enjoyed conspicuous success in persuading foreign audiences that France had shut off all non-violent routes to Algerian self-determination. Part of their success lay in exposing the hollowness of French assimilationist rhetoric; part in establishing Algeria’s emblematic status as symbol of a burgeoning ‘Third World’. For Algerians, so the message went, read black Africans, Vietnamese, or Latin American Amerindians, peoples long silenced by colonialism, whose demands for equitable treatment were at last being heard.136 Paradoxically, the force of this message was enhanced by a crushing defeat.
Over a ten-month period from January to October 1957 the French army dismantled Saadi Yacef’s network of FLN cells in Algiers. In late February, Larbi Ben M’Hidi, one of the FLN’s original founders, was captured and later murdered in army custody. Other locally-based members of the movement’s executive ‘Coordination Committee’ fled the city. Several departed for foreign exile. Yacef, too, was ultimately caught, his deputies, including Ali Ammar (alias Ali La Pointe) cornered and killed.
Several aspects of this asymmetric ‘battle’ between urban guerrillas and professional soldiers gripped international attention. As anyone who has seen Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film dramatizing the battle’s signal events will know, women couriers—Djamila Bouhired, Zohra Drif, Samia Lakhdari, and others—took the war into the heart of European Algiers. They planted bombs in government offices, cafés, dancehalls, and sports venues. Scores of settlers, young and old, were killed. Entire sections of the capital were locked down. The knotty backstreets of its casbah became the battle’s lynchpin. The heart of Yacef’s secretive political fiefdom, the casbah was the concrete embodiment of a people hemmed in by colonial oppression. Barriers, checkpoints, and curfews fostered the image of a dual, segregated city, its poorest inhabitants in its most authentically Arab quarter besieged by foreign occupiers. The apogee of this urban warfare came on 8 October 1957 after the army surrounded the hideout of the casbah’s most notorious bombers, a team of four led by Ali La Pointe, the bomb-maker Mahmoud Bouhamidi, their female assistant, the teenaged Hassiba Ben Bouali, and a twelve-year-old boy, ‘petit’ Yacef Omar. After they refused to surrender, their flat was dynamited. So many charges were laid that not only were the quartet blown to bits, but seventeen of their neighbours died as the entire tenement came down. The bombing was a final, unforgettable illustration of the army’s loss of tactical focus and ethical constraint. The revolution had four more martyrs to celebrate; the casbah’s residents yet more reason to detest the troops.137 Their moral compass spinning wildly out of control, the actions of these military occupiers, spearheaded by General Massu’s parachutists, made the battle of Algiers infamous.
As in other colonial counter-insurgencies, the fight against local opponents concealed among a civilian population was intelligence led.138 The strategy adopted and the troops assigned to lead it transferred direct from a predominantly rural rebellion where extreme measures—free-fire zones, collective punishments, summary executions—were endemic, although, as yet, little publicized. Nairobi’s Operation Anvil was an obvious precedent. But the means used to extract the information necessary to discover the connections between FLN leaders, bomb-makers, couriers, and their supporters was what set the Algiers experience apart. To be sure, beatings, torture, and rape had been used—indeed, were being used—in other wars of decolonization, but Massu’s lieutenants set about it with cold, systematic efficiency. Torture was part of a well-organized process, not a departure from the norm, but the very norm itself. Its ostensible objective was to extract usable information quickly, but its grotesque ingredients, dehumanizing and highly sexualized, defied such matter-of-fact, ‘for the greater good’ logic. Torture centres sprang up, their fearsome reputations evoked by the merest reference to the quaint-sounding villas—Rose, Susini, Tourelles—that housed them. The quantity of Algiers residents taken into custody at some point during the ‘battle’ ran into the thousands. In an information-gathering system otherwise known for its card indexes and mathematical precision, the numbers killed were never precisely tallied. In addition to those who turned up dead on street corners or floating in the Bay of Algiers, over 3,000 Algiers residents were permanently ‘disappeared’.139
For publics and media commentators worldwide it was the chilling parallel with France’s own tragic past under Nazi occupation that distinguished the battle of Algiers. Individuals, including leading politicians, writers, and academics tortured for resistance activity, as well as French associations representing victims of Nazi deportation began to speak out, insisting that such practices should never be used in their name. On 27 July 1957 Le Monde published the findings of an ‘International Commission against the regime of concentration camps’, which shone a spotlight on the thousands of Algerians who were arbitrarily arrested and forcibly removed to detention centres or resettlement camps. Justified by the Algiers authorities as a means to cut off the ALN’s civilian sources of supply and as a way to protect isolated rural communities from the guerrillas’ predations, the camps in fact represented the largest forcible internment of a civilian population conducted anywhere in the colonial world.140 A day earlier the newspaper printed harrowing accounts by five members of the International Voluntary Service for Peace, picked up and tortured by a parachutist patrol.141
Where Le Monde led, others followed. While the paper’s editor, Hubert Beuve-Méry, focused on human rights abuses, contributors to Le Monde’s right-wing broadsheet rival Le Figaro highlighted the war’s financial drain on the French economy, implicitly connecting unsustainable expenditure with indefensible military tactics.142 By the end of 1957 the FLN’s Algiers apparatus was, for a time at least, broken. The FLN’s casbah cells were destroyed, but the movement’s international reputation as self-sacrificing and legitimate was cemented. For most observers the world over, the French presence in Algeria became something repellent: dictatorial, sadistically cruel, and morally bankrupt. Until South African troops mowed down ANC protestors at Sharpeville three years later, the battle of Algiers did more to delegitimize white minority rule in Africa than any other security force action of the decolonization era.
The link between order and reform, between the restoration of security and the promotion of constructive social change, was now impossible to sustain.
British imperial authorities and right-wing media outlets matched their French counterparts in their preference for euphemism and prosaic vocabulary to describe sustained colonial violence. There were obvious advantages in deploying the language of the ordinary, of law, order, and ‘the restoration of calm’ to describe extraordinary violence and social breakdown. Prosaic terminology was meant to depoliticize anti-colonial rebellion and make the resultant European repression seem limited and excusable. It was also critical to avoid the vocabulary of war, which conferred combatants’ rights and brought both international law and foreign scrutiny into play.143 For French professional soldiers in Algeria, describing napalm bombs as ‘special delivery tins’, torture with electric shocks as ‘rock ’n’ roll’, or escorting a detainee outside for execution as ‘firewood duty’, trivialized the killing involved while erecting the psychological barriers needed to cope with it.144 Described by Roland Barthes in relation to French depictions of the crackdown in Algeria, this ‘African grammar’ was spoken equally fluently in British colonial conflict zones where the extraordinarily large numbers of ‘prisoners shot while trying to escape’ speak for themselves.145
In a sense, then, the issue at hand is quantitative, not qualitative. The Algerian War was longer, bigger, and nastier than anything in the British experience. A simple tally of the overall French military commitment underlines the difference: never less than 400,000 French military personnel deployed in Algeria between 1956 and 1961; more than two million armed forces personnel who served in the war, of which 1,179,523 were conscripts performing national service.146 These numbers were redolent of world war, not the ‘internal affair’ of a colonial emergency. And, as we shall see, in the next chapter concluding the examination of fight and flight in Algeria, by the start of 1958 the war was not just tearing the colony apart; it was destroying the fabric of republican democracy in France.
