The Algerian conflict expanded massively in 1956 and became dirtier over the course of 1957. It changed fundamentally once more in 1958. It was obvious by that point that the Algerian War was the most pressing unresolved colonial dilemma of the late 1950s. Algeria’s endgame was bound to affect choices between fight or flight more generally because it encapsulated the most basic of all the questions thrown up by decolonization: could white Europeans and Africans live together after empire was gone? The British, too, faced problems with intransigent, white-minority regimes in apartheid South Africa and, more directly, the Central African Federation, the cluster of three territories under the sway of the Southern Rhodesia government. But the fact that France was already sinking in its North African quagmire lent influence to those British observers who knew most about it.
In mid January 1957, during the week that General Jacques Massu’s elite forces began their merciless ‘clean-up’ of the Algiers casbah, Lieutenant-Colonel A.J. Wilson, Britain’s military attaché in the Algerian capital, reported on the contrasting morale of French regular and conscript troops. His comments were prophetic. Professional soldiers were remarkably up-beat, reluctant conscripts less so. But the ‘real danger’ was the senior officers; the Colonels and Generals, many of whom had been on uninterrupted colonial service since 1947.1 These empire centurions, enthusiasts for revolutionary warfare, were the architects of dirty war. They even dubbed their opponents ‘les Viets’ in reference to the bitter lessons they claimed to have learned from the Vietminh.2 Their embrace of ultra-nationalism and ultra-violence, and, for some, their psychotic alienation from civilian life, made them difficult for less troubled minds to comprehend. Sitting opposite the inquiring British attaché, Commander-in-Chief Raoul Salan was so inscrutable that the Englishman was reduced to complimenting the General’s famed blue rinse. Massu was more forthcoming, even jocular; but his messianic views on population control left the attaché baffled. Lieutenant-Colonel Feaugas, a moving force in the Algiers psychological warfare bureau and an early defender of the expediency of torture, ‘had something of the spell of Laurence [sic] of Arabia about him’.3 One thing was clear about this trio. Their fondness for ‘spectacular’ military operations blinded them to the consequences of their own actions. More than anything else, it was hard to take seriously the army’s additional roles as protector, pacifier, and administrator while its frontline hard-core espoused such radical violence. To be sure, the army had a softer side. Its 600-strong Sections Administratives Spécialisées of countryside administrators were central to the government’s rural development programmes. But for most Algerians the appearance of French soldiers inspired fear and loathing, not relief and reform.4
Eight months later, in August 1957, Wilson’s superior, Paris military attaché Brigadier Jackson, revisited French army prospects at the height of the battle for Algiers. Writing as Massu’s parachutist snatch squads and backroom torturers tore open the FLN’s urban cell structure, Jackson recognized that the war’s two strategic epicentres lay elsewhere: in the struggle over the ALN’s principal overland supply-line along the Algeria–Tunisia frontier and in the contest between French army and FLN for control over Algeria’s rural masses.5
At the level of strategic assessment, British military observers persisted in evaluating French success in terms of the losses inflicted on the ALN rather than in relation to other intangible factors more critical in counter-insurgency. Next to the bald facts about army killings and skirmishes with ALN units, little was said either about the corrosive effects of insurgent violence on Algeria’s economy and society, or about the war’s moral economy as registered in the shifting loyalties of the civilian population.6 Typical in this regard was Brigadier Jackson’s April 1958 assessment of the success of the Morice Line. 200 miles of barbed wire, minefields, blockhouses, and electrified fence, largely constructed during 1957, the Line promised several advantages. ALN bands could no longer traverse the Algeria–Tunisia frontier easily.7 Crossing into Algeria to conduct operations in the eastern province of Constantine or returning the other way to seek sanctuary and supplies in Tunisia became perilous. In the event, the Morice Line slowed, but did not stop ALN incursions. As total interdiction proved impossible, interception became more critical. The objective was to eliminate the ALN as an effective fighting force. Jackson did not mince words:
The French have also now appreciated the need for high quality troops for the final kill. At the start, a number of rebel bands were able to slip away or avoid total destruction because the attacking units were not really prepared to come to close quarters. When the majority of the 25th Parachute Division and some units of the Foreign Legion were moved in to act as shock troops, the final part of the operation ceased to be in doubt. The French have suffered casualties which were quite heavy for peacetime, but they are killing rebels at the rate of somewhere between 5 to 10 to 1, depending on the toughness of the bands.8
In July 1958, Lieutenant-Colonel Breil, acting head of French military intelligence in Algiers, briefed Wilson about the FLN–ALN structure of administrative regions, or wilaya. Their increasingly sophisticated local sub-divisions are shown in Map 13. The Frenchman focused on rebel numbers (an estimated 21,000 ‘regulars’ and 30,000 auxiliary supplétifs), their weaponry (including an estimated 800 machine-guns), and their regional deployment (densest in Eastern Algeria).9 Again, Wilson was impressed by news from the Morice Line. Breil told him of an intense encounter, which occurred over four days in May at Souk Ahras. By the time the shooting stopped, over 800 ALN fighters were dead.10 The Military Attaché came away convinced that the ALN was close to destruction. But he still knew precious little about the decisive relationships between the FLN and the civilian population.11
Indeed, the striking omission from these British observers’ assessments was the Algerian people. Appreciations of public sentiment, of shifting allegiances, of changing opinion there certainly were, but most derived from elite sources, whether ministers, colonial officials, army commanders, or nationalist party representatives. Reports based on unmediated dialogue with Algerians of no particular political influence were non-existent. The void was partially filled by Roderick Sarell, British consul in Algiers. A deeply compassionate man, he was shocked by the daily discriminations and psychological violence inherent to inter-communal relations in the Algerian capital. Only Muslims were stopped at road blocks. Their freedom of movement between locales was restricted by a network of block wardens; only they were under strict curfew at night. Police beatings were reserved for them.12 Inevitably, Algerian civil society mutated, becoming more impenetrable under the pressures of war. French official pronouncements conveyed no sense of this—of ordinary people’s attentisme: their daily struggle to avoid taking sides by steering clear of the violence.13 It was this effort not to commit, at least not in public, despite the unrelenting pressure from both sides to do otherwise, that consumed ‘ordinary’ Algerians.14 The stark alternatives of fight or flight were mirrored in personal lives as much as in national politics. Might Charles de Gaulle make a difference?
Map 13. FLN and ALN administrative districts, 1959 (adapted from SHD-DAT, 1H1600).
Early indications suggested so. In May 1958 de Gaulle returned to power riding a wave of Algiers protests against a French political elite accused of having lost its way. For all the settler euphoria attending the General’s intervention, the war had four more years to run. And de Gaulle made an unlikely colonists’ darling. He held no strong attachment to Algeria. His northern-French family contained few emigrants. He had forged his military career in the metropolitan army, not its colonial equivalent. Admittedly, he knew Algiers well, but he held no fondness for it. His wartime memories of settlers backing his Vichy opponents hardly endeared him to the cause of French Algeria. For all that, de Gaulle was a republican, albeit an imperious, rather autocratic one. And Algeria was part of the French Republic. Surely no one knew better what consequences a French military defeat in its colonial backyard might have. Despite the fog surrounding his intentions for Algeria, the conflict had reached a tipping point.
The manner of de Gaulle’s return to office underlined the point. In April the Minister of National Defence Jacques Chaban-Delmas made plans for Léon Delbeque, a Gaullist fixer from northern France, to visit Algiers. Jacques Soustelle’s Union for the Salvation and Renewal of French Algeria (USRAF in French) ensured that Delbeque reeled in a prize catch on his political fishing trip. Half party, half protest movement, the USRAF brought together renegade Gaullists like Soustelle and André Morice with former colonial governors and pro-settler interest groups. They encouraged Delbeque not merely to evaluate, but also to nurture support for de Gaulle among colon leaders and the army command.15 Another Gaullist networker, Jacques Foccart, a secretive deal-maker with close links to the French overseas intelligence service, the SDECE, consolidated these contacts with the Algiers Generals.16 De Gaulle was thus made aware that influential settlers and senior officers favoured more than a change of government. They wanted a change in regime.
International pressures also came into play. The tide of decolonization had engulfed Morocco and Tunisia two years earlier, making for troublesome neighbours on Algeria’s flanks. Indeed, it was Tunisian outrage at a French air force search-and-destroy mission against the Tunisian border town of Sakiet Sidi-Youssef that helped precipitate the May crisis itself. French bombs aimed at an ALN re-supply centre destroyed a Sakiet primary school killing scores of children.17 The press images were shocking. The UN became involved. Washington joined the chorus insisting on a French admission of guilt.18
Decolonization’s floodwaters were also rising below the Sahara. A series of French West African elections over the spring of 1957 produced governments-in-waiting and the possibility of new partnership arrangements both with France and with one another.19 Closer to home, the settlers’ sympathetic governor Robert Lacoste faced replacement. Worst of all for the imperialist diehards in Algiers, French Prime Minister Pierre Pflimlin seemed keen to emulate Mendès France’s decisive 1954 break with the colonial past by entering negotiations with a hated nationalist enemy—the FLN. Rabble-rousers like student leader Pierre Lagaillarde and the Poujadist Joseph Ortiz took to the streets; indeed, these and other local USRAF organizers threatened to unleash ‘ungovernable settler anger’ if Paris politicians went soft on the war.20 Colonels Roger Trinquier, Yves Godard, and Michel Goussault, zealots of the influential psychological warfare ‘Fifth Bureau’, were perfectly willing to manipulate local opinion as required, utilizing the army’s urban social work teams (the Section administrative urbaine—SAU) to do so.21 Massu, their divisional commander, also harboured Gaullist sympathies.
In the aftermath of the battle of Algiers, Fifth Bureau officers and SAU personnel assigned to the city’s bidonvilles knew how to coerce the capital’s population into doing their bidding. Outwardly at least, colourful demonstrations in which settlers and professional soldiers linked arms with harki auxiliaries and Muslim ex-servicemen evoked inter-communal solidarity against FLN violence. In fact, apparently spontaneous expressions of such ‘fraternization’ were no such thing, the participants having been tutored by Fifth Bureau officers beforehand.22
Figure 16. Ever loyal? Algerian veterans of the First World War parade through Algiers during Armistice Day commemorations on 11 November 1957.
Mass unveilings of Muslim women in the Algiers forum, officially celebrated as symbolizing Franco-Algerian ‘sisterhood’, marked the next step in the sinister social engineering of the May crisis. A group of young women who ceremoniously removed their haïks on the 17th were selected for their ‘modern’, ‘attractive’, and ‘European’ appearance from a group of secretaries in a nearby typing pool. And the poorer women who followed them a day later were recruited from the Cité Mahiéddine, a dockworkers’ bidonville, where the SAU was especially active.23 SAU officers had ordered representatives of local residents’ blocks to produce suitably compliant candidates for unveiling.24 Orchestrated with Machiavellian precision, these powerful demonstrations of integration in action were a propaganda triumph—photographed, filmed, and broadcast worldwide.
The stage was set for a populist alliance between settlers, military professionals, and ostensibly loyalist Algerians united under the banner of Algérie française. By the time the fraternization ceremonies occurred, that banner was already raised. A week of settler demonstrations between 9 and 15 May called repeatedly for a change in French government. The protests, at first organized by a shadowy ‘Committee of Vigilance’ led by Lagaillarde, Ortiz, and like-minded diehards, were taken over by a successor ‘Committee of Public Safety’. Their rabble-rousing tone suggested that a coup was imminent. But Massu had a more limited objective in mind. He imposed himself on the new Committee to focus its efforts on securing de Gaulle’s ascendancy. The allusions to the French Revolution in the committee’s title were deliberate. Popular will, it implied, must be obeyed. The point was underlined by the threat of hard-bitten units from Algiers descending on Paris to overthrow a rotten regime. De Gaulle, not surprisingly, concealed any fore-knowledge of the plotting or any clear stance on the war. As Macmillan noted drily in his diary on the night of 16 May, ‘De Gaulle has made an equivocal statement, but one which has terrified the French politicians. It is cast in his usual scornful, but enigmatic language.’25 Did the General favour fight or flight? Neither before, during, nor after the May crisis did he intend to say. In the event, despite a parachutists’ ‘takeover’ in Corsica on 24–25 May, there was no bloody revolution.26 The menace was enough. Pflimlin at the head of a crisis-bound coalition, and Guy Mollet, the leader of the National Assembly’s largest voting bloc, bowed to the protestors and approved de Gaulle’s investiture as prime minister on 29 May.27
Some of their long-time political partners were less quiescent. On 1 June 1958, in the first Chamber of Deputies debate since the Algiers protests, François Mitterrand condemned the abuse of legal process intrinsic to the General’s resumption of power. He was followed by Pierre Cot. The veteran left-winger simply asked de Gaulle, ‘Who made you King?’ The obvious answer was that de Gaulle and the unelected head of his Private Office, Georges Pompidou, owed their positions to the conniving between their political fixers, the army officers behind the ‘Committee of Public Safety’, and the settler crowds determined to conserve white minority rule. De Gaulle was catapulted back into power by an ugly combination of surreptitious pre-planning, a local military takeover, and plebiscitary mob rule that subverted French democracy. ‘So what?’ parliamentarians and public in France appeared to say. The subsequent vote granting the new government emergency powers and the right to reform the constitution went decisively in the General’s favour. 329 deputies supported de Gaulle’s investiture against 224 (141 of them Communists) who opposed it.28
With this, the certainties of Fourth Republic party politics collapsed. The relative ease with which de Gaulle swept away, not only the incumbent government but the institutional apparatus of France’s post-war regime confirmed what had been apparent for some months. France’s coalition politics had become unworkable. Most important, the French public’s clear preference for decisive leadership over parliamentary horse-trading and turnstile coalitions condemned the Fourth Republic’s governing elite to the wilderness. The political centre fell way. Parties once integral to post-war government—the Socialists and their UDSR cousins, the Radicals and, above all, the Christian Democrat MRP—were never likely to become a ‘loyal opposition’. Both the Socialists and the MRP fractured; the latter irredeemably so. For the once mighty MRP, proud creation of former premiers Georges Bidault and Robert Schuman among others, internal factionalism would dominate internal party affairs for the remainder of the Algerian War.29 For some, including the MRP’s affiliate Christian Trade Union Confederation, the rough-shod manner of de Gaulle’s restoration was too much to swallow.30 For others, including Bidault and the Party’s Algerian federations, the problem was less how de Gaulle got the keys to the Elysée Palace than what he planned to do with Algeria once inside. Utterly intransigent in their faith in Franco-Algerian integration, some MRP hardliners, Bidault foremost among them, would end up condoning the terrorism of the Secret Army Organization (OAS) if it helped keep Algeria French.31 The Algiers shockwave had travelled northwards across the Mediterranean with devastating political results.
As we shall see, the dramatic turn of events in Algiers bore some comparison with settler rebellion in Souther Rhodesia, which, by the 1960s, was Britain’s sole remaining white-ruled dependency. Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in 1965 confirmed the failure of British efforts to steer the territory towards black majority rule. Or, to phrase it differently, it exposed the limitations of a flight strategy lacking the muscle to persuade Rhodesia’s settler leaders to change political course. Prior to that, the question facing France and Algeria in the summer of 1958 was whether de Gaulle’s government would follow or defy the combination of settlers and army officers that had been so instrumental in creating it.
It was not long before de Gaulle disabused the Algiers radicals who had mistaken him for their saviour. On 3 October the new French government raised the possibility of political amnesties for ALN fighters who laid down their arms. Three weeks later came the first official offer of a full ceasefire since the war began. De Gaulle’s so-called ‘peace of the brave’ responded to the FLN’s establishment of a ‘Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic’ (GPRA in French) on 19 September.32 French ministers and officials privately disparaged the GPRA. The dismissive description by the London ambassador Jean Chauvel of a ‘so-called Algerian government’ without any territorial basis and ‘no means of influence other than assassination and terror’ was fairly typical.33 But, as de Gaulle knew, the new FLN executive was not going away. Formally recognized by most Arab governments and feted by fellow non-aligned states, the GPRA also received highly publicized ‘best wishes’ from Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow.34 Its public face, represented by Algeria’s elder statesman Ferhat Abbas and Information Minister Mohammed Yazid, a familiar presence in the UN’s New York headquarters, concealed the fact that the GPRA’s real powerbrokers were a more hard-line trio of original FLN founders, Belkacem Krim, Vice-President with responsibility for armed forces, Lakkhdar Ben Tobbal (at Interior), and the secret services boss Abdelhafid Boussouf. These three were immune to de Gaulle’s coaxing. They heaped scorn on the General’s 24 October promise that the French army would protect Algeria’s Muslims as well as its Europeans.35 This was rash. His peace offer rejected, de Gaulle reverted to other, more conventional means of persuasion.
During the first six months of 1959 unrelenting French army offensives pushed the ALN to the brink of military defeat. Their architect was Maurice Challe, a diminutive, pipe-smoking air force general, appointed on 12 December 1958 to replace the inscrutable Raoul Salan as commander in Algeria.36 As mentioned earlier, between July 1957 and November 1959 army engineers erected over 1,300 kilometres of electric fencing along Algeria’s eastern frontier with Tunisia. Blockhouses, over a million anti-personnel mines, and almost 80,000 French assault troops completed the so-called Morice Line, shutting off the ALN from its principal refuge and primary source of overland resupply.37 An equivalent barrier was also established along Algeria’s western border with Morocco. These frontier defences were the prerequisite to Challe’s transformative year of command. Militarily, it was every bit as significant—and, as it turned out, as transient—as de Lattre’s impact on Indochina had been seven years before.38 Like de Lattre, Challe was an enthusiast for bold, some would say risky, initiatives. It was he who devised the key elements of the Suez Operation in October 1956.39 His Algerian schema was reducible to two elements. Helicopters to chase down guerrilla bands, plus harkis, the Algerian paramilitaries recruited to assist frontline operations: these were the keys to victory in 1959.40
Challe’s 60,000-plus harkis and his airborne troops’ ever-expanding search-and-destroy missions cut ALN cadres by well over fifty per cent.41 Yet over the course of the same year de Gaulle’s administration edged closer towards negotiations with the FLN, opening the door to French withdrawal from Algeria. How do we reconcile these apparent opposites? Answering this question is important. For one thing, the evidence that tens of thousands of volunteer militiamen were willing to side with France, placing their families at risk of FLN retribution, suggests either that the army was winning the battle for Algerian loyalties or that the FLN was losing it through its terroristic methods and the naked self-interest of some of its wilaya commanders.42 For another thing, the events of 1959 made plain that de Gaulle could square the circle between short-term military advance and longer-term decolonization whereas the army’s senior officers in Algeria could not. The result was the worst crisis in French civil–military relations since the creation of the Vichy state in July 1940. The opposing logics of fight and flight were now institutionally personified in confrontation between a purposeful civilian government and the heads of a disaffected colonial army.
Matters first came to a head with the ‘Barricades week’ in Algiers in late January 1960. Before that, the widening gulf between the army leadership in Algiers and de Gaulle’s supporters in Paris had provoked angry exchanges over political and economic planning for Algeria’s long-term future. While Challe propelled his offensives forward during 1959, schemes to modify Algerian citizenship status, to improve access to welfare services, and to modernize the Algerian economy through massive housing and infrastructure projects were all undone by the underlying stresses of the war. Was such investment affordable at a time when the army was swallowing so much money? And who would risk moving into government-sponsored homes in defiance of the FLN? The advocates of such schemes were undeterred. As these ideas evinced, the Paris government and its civilian representative in Algiers, Paul Delouvrier, abandoned the old ‘order before reform’ logic of fight before flight that had condemned the reformist planning of the Mollet era to irrelevance. A man of sharp suits but cautious pronouncements, Delouvrier was the embodiment of his technocratic training inside the Franco-German Coal and Steel Community. The antithesis of the populist Soustelle and the impassioned Lacoste, Delouvrier assumed the unambiguously subordinate position of ‘delegate-general’ rather than governor.43 But Delouvrier’s title also conferred one clear advantage: a hot-line to his presidential boss. Fastidiously bureaucratic, he soon alerted the Elysée Palace to the twin problems of funding shortfalls and local obstructionism that would thwart any rapid achievement of Algerian development. On the one hand, military expertise was essential to provide the security and specialist personnel necessary to put rural welfare into practice. On the other hand, the cash to finance the government’s transformative development scheme, the Constantine Plan, was never likely to be forthcoming from a French exchequer faced with mounting war costs and costly expansion of France’s nuclear programme.
Ironically, the Constantine Plan, named after the city where de Gaulle first announced its outlines on 3 October 1958, was supposed to complement the ramping up of military operations.44 But finding the money for a million new homes or the investment to create 400,000 new jobs—the taglines of de Gaulle’s Constantine speech—was impossible while bankrolling a major ground war as well.45 On 10 February 1959, with the Challe offensive rolling on, premier Michel Debré assigned implementation schedules to specialist planning commissions in Paris, the ‘super-prefects’, or IGAMEs in Algeria, and the departmental authorities beneath them. Serious in intent, the Constantine Plan was a sham even so. Some basic economic facts help explain why. At least 6.5 million Algerians still depended on an agricultural sector in which approximately 22,000 settler-owned farms produced a volume of saleable produce equivalent to that of an estimated 600,000 Algerian-owned smallholdings. The Constantine Plan skirted this, the fundamental injustice of Algerian rural life. Instead, the central problem of economic survival in the Algerian countryside—chronic land shortage—went unanswered.46 The obvious colonial roots of this agricultural iniquity were replicated within Algeria’s public sector as well. Here, the Constantine Plan had more to say. Clerical jobs in the administration, once reserved for full French citizens, were opened up to ‘French Algerian Muslims’. But decades of under-education and fear of FLN retribution left three out of every four bureaucratic vacancies unfilled after the Plan finally secured government approval on 13 June 1960.47 By that point, the prospect of flight through negotiation rather than fight-plus-development made sounder financial sense.48 Indeed, it was policy.
On 16 September 1959 de Gaulle made a decisive speech, simultaneously transmitted on French TV and radio, announcing his government’s support for an Algerian ceasefire, amnesty, elections, and eventual self-determination. The FLN, increasingly factionalized and reeling from Challe’s military onslaught, was slow to respond.49 It did not matter. The French authorities had made the decisive shift towards negotiated withdrawal, to decolonization by flight.
The USRAF diehards, now organized into an ultra-rightist ‘French National Front’ (FNF), channelled their outrage into plotting. The revelation in January 1960 that their military hero Jacques Massu was being recalled to France, spurred them to action. Decked in Castro-like military fatigues and dark sunglasses, Pierre Lagaillarde and another, younger student leader, Jean-Jacques Susini, took their defiance over the brink from May ’58-style protests to violent direct action. Algiers University was occupied by scores of youthful paramilitaries. Street barricades were thrown up in downtown Algiers.50 Numerous army officers as well as Massu’s parachutists, disgusted by the cold ingratitude of their home government, clearly sympathized with this resumption of Algérie française disorder.51
The ‘barricades week’ in late January 1960 did not signify a return to the exuberance of the May crisis, but something darker: a desperate bid to keep Algeria French that prefigured the counter-terrorist killings conducted by the disaffected soldiers and FNF militants who joined forces in the OAS. Whereas the May 1958 demonstrations had been scrupulously planned, the scenes in Algiers during the final days of January 1960 were riotous, anarchic, and reactionary. This time around, the revolutionary symbolism implicit in the romanticized moniker ‘barricades week’ was wholly inappropriate. On the evening of Monday 25 January the Algiers gendarmerie in full riot gear moved in to clear the barricades and reopen the university. Settler vigilantes fired down on the unfortunate riot squad from apartment balconies, killing fourteen. Others set upon the gendarmes in the street, seriously injuring many more.52 The stresses of colonial conflict were culminating in a dystopian mirror image of the Algerian-vs-Algerian civil war between the FLN and Messali Hadj’s MNA. The cycle of internecine bloodletting amongst Algeria’s European population had begun.
To this tragic irony was added another. Before barricades week, disdain for pieds noirs extremism was one of the few things on which professional soldiers and conscripts could agree. Meanwhile, among rural settlers in particular, there was growing realization that heavy-handed military interventions, supposedly mounted on their behalf, only compounded their exposure to danger in the longer term. Operations against ALN bands were mobile and fleeting, at odds with the seasonal routines of country life in which farming families were often left alone to face increasingly hostile Algerian villagers and farmhands.53 After barricades week it was harder to disparage settler politics or inappropriate military tactics without risking ostracism or OAS retribution.
Clearly, the war’s grim political logic was changing. In the three months between October and December 1960 the French army listed 1,214 ‘kills’ of ALN fighters, a figure that pointed to the continuing intensity of military operations. Yet perhaps more significant was the FLN’s response. Rather than fighting harder against French forces, the ALN increasingly focused its own efforts on the elimination of Algerian rivals and other ‘collaborators’ such as elected officials and local government employees. The movement’s short-term priority, in other words, was to clear the path for its seizure of power.54
The string of unbroken French military successes, beginning with the Morice Line’s construction and climaxing with the Challe offensives in 1959, convinced British military observers in the months preceding Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ speech in February 1960 that the FLN might yet accede to de Gaulle’s call for negotiations.55 Barricades week made British ministers think again. After a year of humiliating revelations of British colonial violence in Kenya, the Central African Federation and Cyprus, the sight of rebellious troops and colon ultras manning the Algiers barricades in January 1960 conjured up frightening images of something similar happening in anglophone southern Africa.56 The first open revolt since May 1958 against de Gaulle’s dual-track strategy of heightened operations and offers of dialogue helped persuade Macmillan that settler extremism in Africa must be checked.57
Almost as troubling, de Gaulle seemed to have other strategic concerns entirely. Hostile to NATO’s multilateral command structure, the General’s inner circle of military advisers were fixated on France’s imminent acquisition of a working nuclear bomb.58 The prospect of Gaullist obstreperousness enhanced by a nuclear trigger was something that, to put it mildly, Whitehall, Number 10, and the White House disliked.59 But it was Algeria’s widening conventional war that provoked greatest alarm. Those, such as Iain MacLeod’s Colonial Office advisers, Britain’s UN delegation in New York, and the mandarins of the Foreign Office, who viewed colonial violence through the prisms of African regional politics, international diplomacy, and changing transnational norms of acceptable state action, were coming to realize through bitter experience that further killing, no matter how effective in narrowly military terms, was deeply counter-productive.60 In part, this perspective signified belated recognition of Britain’s diminishing scope for repressive violence after its string of African humiliations in 1959 and the tightening of budgetary strings expected in the new decade ahead.61 In part, it was a game of catch-up with the Americans as the handover to John F. Kennedy’s new presidential administration became imminent.62 And, in part, it stemmed from shock at the lengths to which settler and army reactionaries would go to salvage white minority rule.63
Meanwhile, inside Algeria and France, a strange inversion of political positions occurred between the supporters and opponents of negotiations and French withdrawal. Proponents of de Gaulle’s flight strategy ridiculed what were once self-evident republican ‘truths’, namely, that Algeria was genuinely French and that its population, European and non-European alike, could be fully-fledged citizens as well. For the first time a French executive conceded that integration could never succeed. Inherent in this was the admission that legal, political, and economic equality between French and Algerians was unachievable. This drift in official rhetoric was most apparent after independence became a reality in 1962. In historian Todd Shepard’s neat summation, ‘French public officials and many French people would assert that Algeria and Algerians had never really been French with the same certainty that had previously accompanied their insistence that Algeria was French.’64 The supreme paradox was that it fell to the last defenders of Algérie française, the OAS, an ultra-right terrorist group that allied long-serving army officers with settler extremists, to defend the French presence in Algeria in republican terms. With uncompromising, if twisted, logic, OAS supporters justified their killings as part of the struggle for assimilation between two peoples united in the single trans-Mediterranean nation that was ‘French Algeria’. Ludicrous as it may seem, a quasi-fascist movement adopted the language of cultural integration and shared Franco-Algerian citizenship that de Gaulle discarded.65
The gulf between the official and OAS versions of French Algerian history was linked to changes in de Gaulle’s government, which increasingly resembled a presidential ‘regime’ as the General augmented his decision-making powers. He did so by appealing directly to French voters through successive referenda, particularly in relation to France’s future in Algeria. Parliamentary debate and party political opposition to de Gaulle’s Algerian policies was side-lined, leaving the field open to the OAS to attack the government line. Perhaps none of this mattered. The government’s abandonment of Franco-Algerian integration mirrored the prevailing conviction among France’s people that Algerian independence and a complete pull-out were inevitable. In this sense, de Gaulle did not transform public opinion, he followed it. What was only in hindsight identified as ‘decolonization’ was viewed at the time as something else—le courant de l’Histoire, the ‘tide of History’.66
In the two-year interval between barricades week in January 1960 and the final round of high-level talks between French and FLN representatives at the spa town of Evian, several factors increased de Gaulle’s freedom to pursue what he tellingly described as an ‘Algerian agenda’. Within the colony, the steady advance of French military control proved less significant than the FLN’s elimination of its internal rivals. As 1960 unfolded it became clear that Algeria’s dominant nationalist movement had weathered the storms of 1957–9. Incursions across the frontier barrier with Tunisia redoubled. Weapons supplied by Eastern bloc countries and Mao’s China transformed the ALN’s fighting capacity. And the GPRA’s announcement in May 1960 that several hundred foreign fighters, including Jordanians, Libyans, and Syrians, had joined the struggle underlined the Algerian War’s capacity to galvanize Arab opinion and destabilize pivotal Middle Eastern regimes.67 No matter that French military forces could still eliminate ALN bands whenever they tracked them down; their movement remained the only nationalist show in town. Seeking alternative negotiating partners was pointless.
Refusing to acknowledge this fact of Algerian political life, in early 1961 four senior French military commanders passed from exasperation to outright mutiny. Mounted in April, the so-called ‘Generals’ coup’ quickly descended into farce. But it might have been otherwise. With a powerful whiff of double standards, de Gaulle, the chief beneficiary of a similar act of officers’ indiscipline three years earlier, this time insisted on total military loyalty to the constitution, to the law, and to the presidential office. He took to the air-waves to broadcast repeatedly to rank-and-file soldiers, settlers, and Algerians alike. Stiff and awkward at diplomatic gatherings, de Gaulle was a masterful radio and TV performer. His sonorous voice, sometimes booming, other times reassuring, inspired confidence in radio listeners. On television he was, by turns, magisterial and avuncular, speaking passionately but calmly, occasionally waving his thick spectacles for dramatic effect. His April 1961 broadcasts portrayed the rebellious Generals as reactionaries, out of touch with Algerian realities and the French public’s appetite for peace.
Their treachery aside, the last-ditch defenders of Algérie française were made to look foolish. Adding insult to injury, de Gaulle ordered the release of 6,000 FLN detainees as a curtain-raiser to the first round of Evian negotiations on 20 May.68 Some never forgave him. In a 29 April letter to the MRP executive, one of the plotters’ supporters in Algiers complained that the city’s ‘prisons, still warm from the presence of recently-freed rebels, all known killers, have opened their doors to admit the true patriots of French Algeria … veterans of Second World War campaigns to liberate Italy and France from fascist oppression’.69
Within France, the issue was less about the need to fight on and more about the need to get on with getting out. The start of the Evian talks was broadly welcomed; their breakdown in mid June lamented. The disappointment was compounded by the apparent failure of further discussions in late July, which stalled over guarantees for settlers and the long-term status of Algeria’s strategically- and economically-critical Saharan region. Public disaffection was matched by bitter press criticism. Reflecting the mood, demonstrations against the war by Algerian immigrants, French trade unionists, church groups, and intellectuals peaked in late 1961.70 On the eve of the Bastille Day festivities de Gaulle had confided to the British Ambassador Sir Pierson Dixon that he planned to recall more troops from Algeria. It was absurd, the General said, to have 400,000 men stuck over there when the war was all but over.71 Two months later, 121 leading public intellectuals, including writers, academics, and ‘New Wave’ film directors, took the logic of de Gaulle’s comment one step further, putting their names to a ‘manifesto’, which affirmed that conscripts were morally entitled to refuse to serve their country in Algeria. Orchestrated by long-time FLN sympathizer Francis Jeanson, this ‘Manifesto of the 121’ gripped the public imagination. Its message was devastatingly simple: no one should be compelled to support an unjust cause.72
It would be wrong to imply that the French public shifted en bloc to an anti-war stance. There was fundamental difference between war fatigue and active anti-colonialism, between support for de Gaulle’s Algerian flight solution and positive recognition of past French misdeeds in North Africa or elsewhere. While the majority of French voters wanted out of Algeria, most refused to go as far as the 121 petitioners had done in acknowledging the legitimacy of Algeria’s fight for independence.73 The limits to French public sympathy for Algerian nationalism, and Algerians more generally, were starkly illustrated by the muted reaction to a night of state terror, not in Algiers or Constantine, but in the heart of Paris.74
In some ways reminiscent of the MTLD’s fateful Bastille Day march in 1953, on 17 October 1961 well-disciplined columns of Algerian demonstrators, representing the 180,000 immigrants domiciled in the Greater Paris region, set out for the capital’s downtown boulevards. They wanted to protest against a night-time curfew imposed twelve days earlier.75 The curfew, restricted to North African immigrant quartiers and banlieue shanty-towns, was the harshest of several restrictions devised by the Prefecture of Police. The capital’s police chief Maurice Papon we have encountered before. His colonial methods of surveillance, repression, and extra-judicial killing, refined during his service in eastern Algeria after 1945, were now transposed to Paris.
Papon saw no reason for restraint. Beginning in August 1961, French police officers and informants had been targeted for assassination by FLN militants within the immigrant community. The curfew was his central riposte. But what followed on the night of 17 October went much further. Demonstrators’ anger at the curfew condensed their resentment at poor-quality housing, social marginalization, and, of course, discriminatory policing. Amongst them were members of FLN commando gangs, veterans of the internecine war against MNA supporters. Some came armed with revolvers. But it was the police, reinforced by Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité (CRS) and Gendarmes mobiles riot squads, who were spoiling for revenge. Scuffles broke out at the margins of the demonstration as snatch squads extracted those identified as ringleaders. In the resultant confusion police began using their wooden nightsticks, or matraques, raining blows on those too slow to disperse. Shots were exchanged, although the facts of who fired first and why were disputed. Those demonstrators dragged off by the police were bundled off to nearby police stations or hauled into darker backstreets. Within a matter of hours well over a hundred Algerians had been fatally shot, strangled, or beaten to death by members of the Paris police force. Several were murdered by death squads comprised of hard-bitten personnel shipped in from Algeria, their activities organized in secrecy by Papon as part of his war against the FLN’s immigrant supporters.76
In a practice perfected over preceding months during which surreptitious killings of FLN suspects had intensified in response to the movement’s targeting of police personnel, officers covered their tracks by stripping the bodies, which were then thrown from city centre bridges into the Seine.77 The river’s downstream lock-gates were conveniently opened to help sluice away the evidence of a colonial war now being fought in the French capital. Papon’s official press release, issued in the early hours of 18 October, described the events curtly. The police, called in to disperse a demonstration, returned fire after being shot at by FLN militants among the crowd. Only two deaths were acknowledged. In fact, taking into account the victims murdered by police in the weeks running up to the demonstration, the number of Algerians killed ran into the hundreds. Paris, 17 October 1961 was the worst peacetime massacre of civilian protestors in Western Europe since the end of the Second World War.78
Demands for a public inquiry into the killings were led by the Socialists’ veteran colonial reformer Gaston Defferre and the former Resistance organizer Eugène Claudius-Petit. Summarizing evidence from doctors who had treated 210 wounded demonstrators, his was the first voice in the National Assembly to connect police brutality with colonial racism. For all that, neither the judiciary nor the French public seemed particularly animated by what had taken place. The press, too, moved on to news of other street violence—the death of seventy-four Algiers demonstrators commemorating the 1 November anniversary of the war’s outbreak in 1954, the threat of heightened OAS counter-terror. Nor did de Gaulle’s government or the GPRA make an issue of 17 October, reluctant to block the path to a negotiated Algerian settlement. Its outlines had become clearer after de Gaulle’s negotiators abandoned plans for an Algerian partition intended to reserve designated urban areas for Europeans and huge tracts of the Sahara for French commercial and military exploitation. In the short term, at least, a shocking low-point of the fight over French Algeria was confined to the shadows by the emerging prospects of flight.79
It took single-minded optimism to see Algerian peace on the horizon as the war’s violence plumbed new depths in early 1962. Factionalized and desperate, the OAS expanded its bombing campaigns in Algiers, Paris, and elsewhere. Government offices, even the homes of Jean-Paul Sartre and another writer, the Minister of Culture André Malraux, were targeted. The cycle of bombings was even worse in Algiers. Daily attacks were launched from the downtown settler neighbourhood of Bab El-Oued. These became increasingly indiscriminate once it became clear that government talks with the FLN, resumed in early February, were likely to culminate in a peace deal.80
French public revulsion at OAS tactics far outstripped the muted response to 17 October. Malraux was absent when his Boulogne-sur-Seine home was bombed on 7 February 1962, but Delphine Renard, the four-year-old daughter of a neighbour, was not. Her bloodied, disfigured face dominated the next day’s press coverage, sparking trade union and left-wing calls for a mass protest against OAS violence. The resultant ‘anti-fascist’ demonstration on the evening of Thursday 8 February was rowdy. There were running battles with police in and around the Place de la Bastille. Matraques were much in evidence once more. Terrified protesters ran for cover down the stairs of the nearby Charonne metro station. Its entrance locked, the station became a crush of humanity in which eight people died. The victims included three women and a sixteen-year-old boy. The funerals for the victims, interred on 13 February in the section of the famous Père Lachaise cemetery reserved for Communist Party supporters, were accompanied by a general strike and the largest public march in Paris since Liberation in July 1944.81 ‘Charonne’ became a by-word for the sheer futility of the Algerian War and the tensions—between ideologies, ethnicities, and generations—which gnawed deeper into French society as the 1960s rolled on. A once silent majority of French people found their voice: military defence of the sham creation Algérie française was an indefensible human expense.
The role reversal implicit in the government’s admission that the French republican project in Algeria was a mirage became manifest in the National Assembly debate that followed de Gaulle’s broadcast on 18 March 1962 announcing an Algerian cease-fire. Algiers Deputy Pierre Portalano denounced de Gaulle’s repudiation of past pledges as a violation of the cardinal principle of a democratic republic: ‘For the first time in the history of the Free World’, he thundered, ‘a Western government has freely abandoned guarantees of domestic liberty and the rights of man.’82 Clearly, it was settlers’ liberty that most concerned him, but still Portalano’s argument had force. All that successive Algerian governors and Paris governments had pledged over decades about the progressive eradication of difference between France and Algeria as the two peoples were forged into a single nation had been dropped like a hot coal, rejected as irrelevant frippery next to decolonization’s irresistible advance. Portalano, then, had a point. But he was also profoundly wrong. Juridical arguments and appeals to republican idealism ignored the central facts that de Gaulle, his ministers and officials, and the overwhelming majority of the French public recognized. To the bitter end Algeria had been ruled as a colony in all but name. And the great majority of its own people wanted the French to leave. Even de Gaulle’s rhetorical flourishes in an evening broadcast on 18 March, in which he emphasized that the final Evian agreement ensured orderly self-determination, guarantees for settlers, plus economic and strategic privileges for France, could not disguise the underlying truth. The FLN had won.83
From his ‘hiding place’ in Algeria, twelve days before the war’s 19 March 1962 ceasefire OAS leader General Salan sent letters to Kennedy, Macmillan, and Adenauer. Salan implored the three Western leaders to understand his movement’s loyalist motives and humanitarian purpose. The OAS, he insisted, was neither fascist nor out to seize power. Its sole aim was to protect Europeans’ rights to fair treatment. The suggestion that colonial whites were victims of a new discrimination inherent in the rush to bring empire to a close was a familiar refrain among those on the losing side of decolonization’s bloodiest confrontations. Stripped of its overblown claims about loyal sons of the soil cruelly abandoned by uncaring home governments, the argument was always the same: those who fought to sustain imperial ties were betrayed by political elites and domestic populations who failed to grasp the realities of colonial life.84
In fact few OAS leaders were ever optimistic that Algeria could be kept French. Their shockingly indiscriminate terrorism during 1961–2 was closer to despairing nihilism than the violent expression of a coherent strategy to seize power. Those OAS militants that evaded capture inhabited a looking-glass world of inverse logic, one in which Oran, always the most European of Algeria’s cities, might yet be preserved as a white enclave in an independent but truncated Algeria deprived of its Saharan south. By late 1961 all talk of settler enclaves and autonomous Saharan regions had been officially dropped.85 Not surprisingly, OAS diehards would make common cause against such betrayals of ‘western civilisation’ in Africa with Katanga separatists in the Congo, with Francisco Franco’s fascist regime, and, most pertinent to us here, with Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front.86
Figure 17. Victory! Residents celebrate the re-opening of the Algiers casbah on 22 March 1962.
As we have seen, the Algerian spectre of kith-and-kin conflict between settlers and metropolitan armed forces haunted British Ministers and service chiefs from the late 1950s onwards.87 A Cyprus settlement in 1959 ended Britain’s colonial oversight and saw its military presence reduced just as General Challe was launching his Algerian offensive. This juxtaposition between a negotiated settlement and an escalating conflict seemed to suggest that, unlike France, Britain was turning away from protracted colonial fights.88
Whatever the contrasting ‘lessons’ of Cyprus and Algeria, they produced less clear-cut rejection of British military intervention against recalcitrant settlers in southern Africa than might be imagined. There was a strong civil–military divide here. By March 1961 senior military figures, including the service chiefs Sir Francis Festing and Lord Louis Mountbatten, as well as the intelligence analysts of the Cabinet’s Joint Intelligence Committee, ruled out deploying British aircraft and soldiers against the white minority regime in the Central African Federation. It is not hard to see why.
There were sound strategic reasons for rejecting the use of overwhelming British military force to overthrow white minority rule and clear the path to African self-government in Nyasaland and Northern and Southern Rhodesia. For a start, British troops would have to be ferried in from some distance, probably from Kenya, making a surprise operation unfeasible. The airfields of the Central African Federation would have to be secured in the opening phase of any attack. But this could not be done without risking large-scale civilian casualties because the C.A.F.’s airbases also served as commercial airstrips. Parachute drops and the use of poor-quality roads to transport supplies presented innumerable difficulties. Reliable intelligence about Federation military units and their likely reaction was sparse.89 It was clear, however, that Federal security forces were quite capable of acting unilaterally—and contrary to British wishes. This point was brought home by their support for Moise Tshombe’s secessionist government in the Congo’s mineral-producing eastern province of Katanga after the Congo Crisis erupted in 1960.90 Roy Welensky’s federal government in Salisbury also took steps in February 1961 to secure additional weaponry and munitions from apartheid South Africa, whose imminent departure from the Commonwealth only increased the probability that the Pretoria regime would relish the opportunity to help give Britain a bloody nose.91
What, then, if white Rhodesian forces resisted invasion? The Federation’s greatest strategic asset was the Royal Rhodesian Air Force. Aside from its potential to attack incoming British forces, it afforded the local defenders greater mobility than their potential British opponents. Destroying RRAF aircraft, whether by commando raids against airbases or by aerial bombardment might have been possible.92 But at what cost? Rather than pre-empting a wider conflict, knocking out the RRAF might escalate military confrontation into all-out war between Britain and Rhodesia’s whites. Behind all these calculations lay the unspoken assumption that British soldiers and airmen might be unwilling to fire on fellow white servicemen, including former comrades in earlier conflicts.93
What about the politics of it all? The greatest oddity is that, first Macmillan’s government and, later, Harold Wilson’s successive Labour administrations between 1964 and 1970 kept returning to the idea of military intervention. And this in spite of the convincing objections to it. Fight was not entirely abandoned despite the overwhelming arguments for flight. The point should not be over-stressed, though. Faced in early 1961 with the prospect of a constitutional breakdown in Central Africa in which the white-controlled Rhodesian regimes used force to block African self-rule, it was incumbent on Macmillan’s Cabinet to explore the possibilities of applying countervailing pressure of their own. The same held true three years later as Southern Rhodesia’s settler militants edged towards a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in defiance of Wilson’s government. For all that, in each case military and intelligence advice was unequivocal: ‘limited’ military action was unfeasible, so intervention meant war. This was a bridge that neither Conservative nor Labour ministers were willing to cross. Wilson ultimately said so, telling the Rhodesian Front regime on the eve of UDI that Britain would not intervene militarily to stop it. The Prime Minister was lambasted in the press and by Cabinet colleagues, including, the Minister of Defence Denis Healey, for throwing away Britain’s bargaining chips. But Wilson was merely stating the obvious. By doing so he also made clear to African nationalist leaders in the region that it was pointless to hope for a British takeover as the prelude to any transfer of power.94
Wilson’s renunciation of force on 30 October 1965 was not quite the end of the story. Senior Labour Party figures including Barbara Castle and Jim Callaghan, not to mention other influential opinion-makers, the Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey for one, insisted that violence might yet be required; this time to impose a form of decolonization rather than to prevent it.95 However genuinely meant, these sentiments persuaded few inside Rhodesia that Britain’s armed forces might risk all for the cause of black freedom. The Wilson government had, for instance, played tougher than its Conservative predecessor with South Africa over arms sales and sports boycotts while stopping short of cutting economic or military ties.96 Ultimately, none of Britain’s 1960s administrations enjoyed much success in bolstering their diplomacy of decolonization with the threat of military action. The fact was that neither side in Rhodesia’s bitter racial struggle believed that British forces would ever be deployed. Few were surprised, then, when Smith’s government raised the stakes.
At 11 a.m. British time on Armistice Day, 11 November 1965, a phalanx of journalists and press photographers gathered in Rhodesia’s Government House to witness the ultra-loyalist imperialists of Smith’s Rhodesian Front (RF) government sign their Unilateral Declaration of Independence. A shambling, rather bizarre ceremony concluded with the opening verses of ‘God Save the Queen’. Smith later told Rhodesian Broadcasting Company listeners that he and they shared the same spirit of ‘kith-and-kin’ solidarity with ordinary Britons that had seen them through two World Wars. It was Labour’s ‘doctrinaire philosophy of appeasement and surrender’ to Soviet-inspired African nationalism that was beyond the pale.97 With this blast of faux-Churchillian rhetoric a settler regime determined to resist black majority rule ostracized itself from the mother country whose values it claimed to cherish. The anglophone settlers of Southern Rhodesia had done what the francophone colons of Algeria never quite did. They rebelled. In Donal Lowry’s words, ‘thus the white Rhodesians became, however reluctantly, the first people of largely British origin to throw off the Crown since the American Revolution’.98
The Crown representative, the Governor Sir Humphrey Gibbs, duly ‘sacked’ the offending RF Cabinet, a pointless exercise insofar as UDI signified the repudiation of Britain’s authority over Southern Rhodesia. Similar confusion reigned elsewhere. There were no British soldiers in Rhodesia, and few civil servants. So Wilson’s government had no means to contest Smith’s decision by enforcing special Orders in Council that, on paper anyway, provided the constitutional basis for upholding British sovereignty.99 Nor was the rupture complete. Rhodesia did not declare itself a republic until 2 March 1970, part of a white supremacist constitutional settlement uncompromisingly hostile to black majority rule. Over the preceding five years, the central plank of the Labour government’s effort to reverse UDI—economic warfare waged by the imposition of wide-ranging sanctions—was also more equivocal than it appeared. For one thing, sanctions imposed in November 1965 in the hope of catalysing Smith’s overthrow, were, from April 1966 onwards, harnessed to British efforts to cajole the RF regime into talks. For another thing, the Southern Rhodesian government retained crucial economic and strategic advantages. Friendly regimes to south, west and east: apartheid South Africa, plus Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, minimized the impact of sanctions. As for Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda, the one black-led Commonwealth state on Southern Rhodesia’s borders, whose copper exports were vital to British industry, Smith’s ministers could easily retaliate by shutting down its power supplies.100
Furthermore, there were plenty in Britain who either opposed Labour’s sanctions policy outright or retained some sympathy for the 230,000 or so white Rhodesians, many of whom, like Smith himself, boasted impeccable war records.101 Men like Smith, after all, had not only fought alongside British ‘mates’ against Hitler and Mussolini, but against other, darker-skinned foes in Malaya and Aden who were determined to bring down the British Empire. For their apologists ‘back home’ it was sixties Britain that was changing for the worst, not Rhodesia. Here were the British echoes of the same political and inter-generational conflicts apparent in France at the close of the Algerian War. Edward Heath, the Conservative Party’s new leader, installed only five months earlier in July 1965, therefore faced a dilemma. He was amenable to a bipartisan approach to otherwise divisive issues of decolonization, but many of his backbenchers thought otherwise. When it came to a parliamentary vote over oil sanctions on 21 December, Tory MPs split three ways. Some endorsed sanctions on principle; others rejected them as ineffectual; and a vocal minority backed the Smith regime.102 What would become an annual ritual of acrimonious Conservative opposition to any renewal of sanctions had begun.
As Christmas 1965 approached goodwill messages to Rhodesia’s prime minister began appearing in The Times classifieds. Smith’s noisiest British parliamentary backers were the Monday Club members led by Lord Salisbury. They defied the Conservative Party Whip and opposed any imposition of sanctions. Salisbury had told the Conservative Party conference a month before UDI that white Rhodesians deserved credit for bringing health, hygiene, and ‘British ideas of peace and justice’ to a backward land. Labour’s support for majority rule was unethical and politically self-defeating, the abandonment of a British ethnic community that had built a thriving African economy. This was a view echoed in the editorial columns of the Daily Express.103 The gift selected by another group of Smith’s British supporters to show solidarity with the rebellious premier was a painting of two Spitfires taking off at dawn. Playing on ‘Good Old Smithy’s’ reputation as a heroic patriot, the evocation of wartime glories carried a powerful subliminal message: ‘that the betrayal of white Rhodesia provided yet another distressing example of how a powerful nation, triumphant in war, had become abject, compromised and defeated in peace’.104
Until its closure in 1969, Rhodesia House, the former home of the British Medical Association at 429 The Strand, symbolized the limbo in which Smith’s UDI regime existed and the reluctance of Wilson’s government to act decisively against it. Denied the status of a high commission, Rhodesia House remained open despite virulent media criticism and periodic ‘sit-in’ occupations by student protestors from the nearby London School of Economics. Time and again Whitehall officials carpeted Sydney Brice, the senior figure at Rhodesia House, for breaches of diplomatic protocol. These ranged from flying the illegal UDI regime flag to collusion in espionage. Still Rhodesia House survived; an embarrassing bricks and mortar reminder of sanctions’ failure to bring down the Smith regime.105
Back in Rhodesia attitudes hardened as sanctions pushed the RF government closer to its regional allies, Pretoria’s apartheid defenders and Portuguese-ruled Angola and Mozambique. Significantly, in the years after UDI the 103,000 settlers who emigrated were outnumbered by 127,000 new arrivals, mostly from South Africa. White support for the RF increased as a result, despite the turnover in the settler population. Among Smith’s most fervent backers were Rhodesian housewives for whom the colony’s Britishness was axiomatic. Although the security of white land tenure, guaranteed by legislation passed in the early 1930s and reaffirmed by the Land Tenure Act in 1969, was central to settler politics, by the start of the 1970s only seven per cent of whites worked in agriculture, giving the lie to the Algeria-style myth of the pioneer farmer. Far more were in white-collar employment or directly employed by the security forces. White Rhodesia may have fought a bush war, but most of its fighters came from the suburbs of Salisbury and Bulawayo.106
The sense that these settlers were closer to conservative ‘middle England’ than to Kenya’s privileged Happy Valley set or the unapologetic racists of South Africa was even reflected in the pages of The Guardian, which, despite its progressive reputation, reported with only the faintest trace of irony about the defining features of Rhodesia’s white suburbanites: ‘there are no beatniks, and people dress up to go to the cinema (where they will certainly not see a French film)’.107 Perhaps the irony lay elsewhere. Parisian movies may not have been to Rhodesian taste, but numerous French firms, notably in the petro-chemical sector, made hay, busting Britain’s sanctions regime by diverting banned exports via a dependable, shockingly corrupt French client-state, Omar Bongo’s Gabon.108
Unwilling to use force to get Smith out and aware that a sanctions regime would take time to bite, Wilson’s government had little choice but to negotiate even after the UDI breakdown. Having aligned fellow Commonwealth members behind them, in late September 1966 Labour ministers resumed their approaches to the Smith regime through gritted teeth. The new Commonwealth Secretary Bert Bowden, like Smith a wartime airman, twice visited the Rhodesian capital in an effort to kick-start dialogue. During Bowden’s first trip, in late September, the Salisbury government denied him access to opposition politicians, including the leader of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) Joshua Nkomo and Ndabaningi Sithole, founder of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), the party led, after independence, by Robert Mugabe. According to Wilson, ‘At the end of the visit Bert Bowden and Mr Smith managed to agree on one thing: a statement listing the areas of disagreement. It was almost total.’109 Bowden’s follow-up visit in November looked to be going worse. He and Smith ‘glowered’ at one another during two fractious—and fruitless—encounters on 25 November. Only when the Governor Sir Humphrey Gibbs brokered another meeting between them did Smith concede that he might be willing to resume ‘constitutional rule’—meaning, in practice, the renunciation of UDI. The way was suddenly open for face-to-face talks—or, as Wilson later put it, ‘a direct confrontation’—between the opposing heads of government.110
Wilson and Defence Secretary Healey resolved to hold this meeting aboard a Royal Naval vessel. They considered three alternative island venues: Cyprus, Malta, or Gibraltar. The cruiser HMS Tiger, docked in Casablanca on a goodwill visit, swung the decision Gibraltar’s way. Seeing the opportunity for a once-only deal, Wilson insisted that Smith should come equipped with plenipotentiary powers. With the agreement of the Cabinet’s Rhodesia Committee, and reassured by Labour’s Chief Whip that any backbench rebellion against a settlement could be contained, Wilson, Bowden, and Attorney-General Sir Elwin Jones flew down to Gibraltar to be met by a winter gale. Negotiations with Smith’s team began early on the morning of 1 December 1966. Threatening more stringent UN sanctions, Wilson pressed Smith to abandon UDI and hold an early general election. A Royal Commission would, meanwhile, submit recommendations on a new Rhodesian constitution. Its proposals would require acceptance by ‘the Rhodesian people as a whole’. Nudging Smith towards elections, an agreed transfer of power, and eventual majority rule, the British prime minister further proposed that, in the short term, the Rhodesian leader reshuffle his Cabinet. The British team produced a list of suitable ‘moderates’ whose presence in government might dilute RF influence, thereby affording Smith greater room for manoeuvre. At first, the Rhodesian premier seemed overwhelmed. Wilson’s proposals, coming thick, fast, and fully formulated, were hard to challenge and, for a while, Smith looked close to caving in. In the end, however, he insisted that his hard-line government colleagues in Salisbury must be consulted. This was tantamount to rejection. ‘The rats’, as Wilson put it, would get at their man.111
He was right. 1967 was remarkable for the absence of any significant movement in the Rhodesian problem. Perhaps inevitably, a problem without much prospect of resolution moved down the list of the Wilson government’s priorities. Rhodesia was neither Britain’s principal economic difficulty nor its major strategic concern. Financial affairs were dominated by 1967’s devaluation crisis. International affairs were consumed by more pressing issues, among them the resumption of efforts to join the EEC, the fallout from the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, civil war in Nigeria, and the advancement of plans to pull back British forces from east of the Suez Canal.112 Rhodesia’s defiance only hardened in the years that followed. In early March 1968 Smith spurned global appeals for clemency, authorizing the hanging of three black Rhodesians convicted of murder, James Dhlamini, Victor Mlambo, and Duly Shadrack.113 The executions prompted the UN to introduce mandatory sanctions against Rhodesia on 29 May.
Few now expected that British negotiators or British bullets could secure a favourable outcome for Rhodesia’s black majority. Wilson, though, made a final bid to break the deadlock, ignoring his Cabinet colleagues’ scepticism. Over five days in mid October 1968 he renewed his face-to-face talks with Smith aboard another Gibraltar-docked warship, HMS Fearless. Prepared to leave the UDI regime in place during a lengthy ‘transitional period’ before the eventual introduction of democracy to Rhodesia, Wilson came perilously close to abandoning the moral high ground that was the principal asset left to a British government confounded by the intransigence of Rhodesia’s settlers. Albeit otherwise than in Algeria, the problems caused by the privileged position of a white European minority within another African dependency defied peaceful solution.
This chapter began by reflecting on how British observers interpreted Algeria’s violent colonial meltdown. An obvious contradiction dogged the resultant British assessments of the conflict’s dynamics. All conceded that the Algerian War, the most traumatic of empire’s endgames, was no longer being played by French rules. Yet most looked to France, its constitutional system, its governments, its military, its cultural values, and its changing societal concerns for explanations of what was happening. Few evaluated Algerian socio-economic conditions, nationalist demands, and the progress of the ALN’s rural insurgency on their own terms. Tellingly, this metropolitan bias in British evaluation of France’s fight or flight alternatives still tilted towards acknowledgement that the FLN was the future. The transition was encapsulated by the September 1961 decision to invite FLN representative Mohamed Kellou to address an unlikely audience: the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton. Furious French protests provoked a last-minute withdrawal of the invitation, but the point had been made.114
Decolonization was a cataclysm for Algerians, European and Muslim alike; far less so for a French public fatigued by the conflict’s slow progress towards negotiated withdrawal. President de Gaulle not only read this public mood, he shared it. The supreme irony of the May crisis was that the presumed emotional connections between de Gaulle, the settler ultras, and their army heroes never existed. Sceptical about republican ideas of ever-closer cultural union, the General was dismissive of the integrationism to which his political predecessors were attached. Crudely put, de Gaulle was never persuaded that Algerians could or should be made French. As he told his Minister of Information Alain Peyrefitte in October 1959, weeks after his call for Algerian self-determination,
We have premised our colonization, since the beginning, on the principle of assimilation. We pretended to turn negroes [nègres] into good Frenchmen. We had them recite ‘The Gauls were our ancestors’ [Nos ancestres les Gaulois] … [That] was not very bright. That is why our decolonization is so much more difficult than that of the English. They always admitted that there were differences between races and cultures.115
De Gaulle’s willingness to confront the decolonization dilemma also pointed to deeper shifts in French military and scientific culture. As historian Dominique Pestre suggests, long-term involvement in colonial wars where conventional equipment predominated caused France to fall behind the United States in developing new military technology. Culturally, too, matters scientific caught the public imagination less than social and philosophical questions, not least the ethical issues surrounding the Algerian conflict. De Gaulle broke the mould. His abandonment of colonial war was tied to his embrace of nuclear technology and the promotion of scientific innovation in France’s private and university sectors.116
Asked in the early 1990s to reflect on their hasty departures from Algeria some thirty years earlier, numerous elderly pieds noirs still saw themselves as ‘exiled’ in a France that had little time for their stories of colonial dispossession. The exodus from Algeria of approximately 600,000 settlers between January and August 1962 was largely unplanned and commensurately chaotic. The French authorities were reluctant to accept so many returnees and even reduced ferry services during the spring months in a bid to stem the inflow. Little wonder that so many of Algeria’s pieds noirs struggled to comprehend what had befallen them. To the shock of Algerian dispossession was added a profound sense of cultural alienation from a mother country that few recognized and in which most felt unwelcome. These were sentiments amplified among the families of Muslim harkis, thousands of whom were forced out of their homeland at independence. Trapped on the wrong side of history, these Algerian loyalists faced social invisibility and economic ghettoization in mainland France. Viewing these experiences at a fifty-year distance one can see that the end of French Algeria triggered the most destabilizing and traumatic of the many population ‘refluxes’ or return migrations of ‘colonials’—whether settlers and officials or policemen and paramilitary auxiliaries—that accompanied European decolonization.
But the Algerian exodus was untypical. For the most part, European return migration was relatively peaceful. Ironically, the very absence of comparable mass evictions from British colonial dependencies has perhaps helped conceal the scale of departures, the great majority of which were more or less voluntary. One researcher has identified 328,080 ‘whites’ in Britain listed under the 1991 census as having been born in former colonial territories.117 The root causes of the eviction of white Rhodesian farmers from independent Zimbabwe at the behest of Robert Mugabe’s regime might lie in the UDI era, but the fact remains that there was nothing in the British experience of 1960s decolonization that matched France’s tumultuous endgames in Algeria.
