Whatever difficulties the French faced in Algeria, in the rest of their African empire – l’Afrique Noire – they remained confident of the loyalty of the fourteen territories they governed. In conducting their ‘civilising mission’ in Africa, they had been highly successful in cultivating a small black elite to whom they accorded full rights as citizens on condition that they accepted assimilation into French society and rejected their African heritage, family law and customs. In outlook, members of the elite saw themselves, and were seen, as Frenchmen, brought up in a tradition of loyalty to France, willingly accepting its government, its language and culture, and taking a certain pride in being citizens of a world power. Their political aspirations centred on securing for the African populations of l’Afrique Noire the same rights and privileges enjoyed by metropolitan Frenchmen. No one campaigned for independence. Political debate tended to reflect metropolitan tastes. The writer Thomas Hodgkin noted in 1954: ‘In British West Africa, everyone who is politically conscious is a nationalist of some kind. In French West Africa, there are Catholics and anti-clericals, Communists and Gaullists, Socialists, Syndicalists and Existentialists.’
Two men personified the close relationship that France strove to establish with its African elite: Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire. Both rose to become ministers in the French government; both acted as staunch advocates of the ‘Union Française’; and both ensured that French influence prevailed even when the empire began to disintegrate.
Senghor achieved distinction not only as a political leader, but as a gifted poet and as an intellectual in the grand French manner, familiar with a vast range of Western literature and philosophy. Born in 1906 into a prosperous Serer trading family, he had been taught by Catholic missionaries in Senegal to scorn his ancestral culture as worthless and to look solely to France for enlightenment. By the time he left Senegal for France at the age of twenty-one, with a government scholarship to pursue his literary studies, he had become the epitome of an alienated but ‘civilised’ black Frenchman. Seven years of study in Paris completed his ‘Frenchification’.
‘With docility we accepted the values of the West; its discursive reason and its techniques,’ he recalled in 1961. ‘Our ambition was to become photographic negatives of the colonisers: “black-skinned Frenchmen”. It went even further, for we would have blushed, if we could have blushed, about our black skin, our frizzled hair, our flat noses, above all for the values of our traditional civilisation . . . Our people . . . , secretly, caused us shame.’
Along with other young black intellectuals living in the Latin quarter of Paris, however, Senghor soon began to react against assimilation. ‘Paradoxically, it was the French who forced us first to seek and then to reveal ourselves to ourselves,’ he remembered. ‘We had been able to assimilate the French language and mathematics, but we weren’t able to slough off either our black skin or our black soul. Thus we were led in search of a passionate quest for a Holy Grail: our collective soul.’
What Senghor and his companions in Paris eventually formulated was a philosophy they termed ‘négritude’, a black consciousness which asserted the unique contributions, values and characteristics of black people and black civilisation. Négritude served as an intellectual precursor to nationalism. But while Senghor stressed the importance of cultural liberation, he nevertheless remained committed to the French empire. ‘To be “a Frenchman above all” is an excellent prescription on the political level,’ he declared.
Remaining in France as a teacher, he became the first African ever to win an ‘agrégation’, a coveted postgraduate degree qualifying him to teach at a lycée. As a naturalised Frenchman, he spent a year on compulsory military service, and when war with Germany broke out, he left the lycée near Paris where he was teaching, to become ‘a second-class soldier’, as he put it, denied a commission because of his race.
When his unit was taken prisoner by the Germans, all the blacks in it were pulled out of the ranks and lined up against a wall. Senghor quickly understood that the Germans intended to execute them on the spot. Just as the firing squad was about to shoot, he recalled, ‘we called out, “Vive la France, Vive l’Afrique Noire”’. At that very moment, the Germans put down their guns. A French officer had persuaded them that such slaughter would be a stain on German honour. Senghor spent eighteen months in prisoner-of-war camps, using his spare time to learn German well enough to read Goethe’s poetry in the original. On his release in 1942, he resumed teaching as a professeur.
Senghor’s political career began in the postwar era. Elected to represent Senegal in the Constituent Assembly in 1945, one of nine African deputies among a throng of nearly six hundred others, he helped draft the new constitution of the Fourth Republic, endorsing the emphasis it placed on the ‘indivisible’ nature of the Union Française. In recognition of his expertise in the French language, he was employed as the official grammarian.
He played an influential role in the Socialist Party in the National Assembly, but eventually became disillusioned with the preoccupations of French socialists. In 1948 he formed his own political party, the Bloc Démocratique Sénégalaise (BDS). As a Catholic in a predominantly Muslim country, and as a Serer rather than a member of the dominant Wolof group, Senghor became adept at building coalitions, seeking support without appealing either to religious or ethnic affiliation. He forged close links with Senegal’s grands marabouts, Muslim religious leaders who exerted strong discipline over their communities; he also gained a reputation as ‘a man of the people’, attentive to the needs of rural masses, content to sit on the floor of peasants’ huts, listening to their complaints and eating whatever he was served; he managed too to reflect the concerns of young radical activists. His inclination for persuasion and compromise became part of Senegal’s political culture, with lasting impact.
Alongside his political activities, Senghor pursued his ambitions in the literary world, meeting regularly with writers and poets at the fashionable Brasserie Lipp on the Left Bank. In 1947 he helped to establish a literary journal, Présence Africaine, which was devoted to promoting black culture; and the following year he published his own Anthologie of new poetry by black writers which included a preface by the French writer Jean-Paul Sartre, entitled ‘Black Orpheus’, examining the notion of négritude. Senghor also began to develop ideas about ‘an African road to socialism’, reworking European socialism into an African idiom, emphasising the importance of African communal traditions.
Even when the winds of nationalism gathered momentum elsewhere in Africa, Senghor remained staunchly loyal to the French cause. He scorned Nkrumah’s ideas as ‘too radical’, advised the Tunisians to keep close ties with France, voted for war appropriations in Algeria and approved the despatch of Senegalese troops to fight the FLN. ‘What I fear,’ he said a few days before the opening of the Bandung conference of non-aligned states on colonial independence in 1955, ‘is that, in the future, under the fatal pressure of African liberation, we might be induced to leave the French orbit. We must stay not only in the French Union but in the French Republic.’
Instead of independence, he advocated a new political federation between France and Africa. Independence for small political entities, with weak economies and few resources, would be no more than ‘pseudo-independence’, he argued. The future lay in large groupings of states working in cooperation with European powers. What was needed was the mobilisation of European resources to help Africa combat poverty, disease and ignorance.
Senghor’s vision of the future, however, was overshadowed by growing friction with Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire. The conflict between them concerned the destiny of the Union Française, not their common loyalty to it but the direction it should take.
A year older than Senghor, Houphouët had taken a more conventional route to prominence. The son of a prosperous, chiefly Baoulé family, born in 1905 in the small village of Yamoussoukro, he had gained an elite education, studying at the Ecole Normale William Ponty in Senegal and graduating as a médecin africain from the School of Medicine in Dakar, the first in his class. Returning to Côte d’Ivoire, he had served in the colonial medical service for fifteen years. After inheriting large landholdings in Yamoussoukro, he had quickly established himself as one of the richest African cocoa planters in the country. He had also been appointed chef de canton of his home district.
His entry into politics came in 1944 when he led a group of African planters, the Syndicat Agricole Africain, in opposing the French policy of discriminating in favour of French planters in Côte d’Ivoire. Elected as a deputy to the Constituent Assembly in 1945, he made it his special task to campaign for an end to forced labour. When in April 1946 he succeeded, by sponsoring a law which became known as the Loi Houphouët-Boigny, he established himself as a national leader, with a popular following in Côte d’Ivoire and beyond. His achievement was celebrated in dances and songs throughout the colony. With this triumph, he was able to turn his Parti Démocratique de la Côte d’Ivoire (PDCI) into the first mass political party in black Africa. He also extended his influence throughout l’Afrique Noire, heading an interterritorial alliance of radical parties, the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA).
To ensure more effective political representation in the National Assembly in Paris, Houphouët chose an alliance with the communists. Initially, the arrangement had its advantages. The communists were represented in the coalition government. Like other French political parties, they valued the empire. They showed no enthusiasm for demands for autonomy for the colonies, but stressed the need for colonial peoples to unite with the French working class, through which they would gain their own emancipation. They were ready to provide practical assistance, funds, training and personnel, both in Paris and in the colonies.
The drawback came in 1947 when the communists abandoned the government in favour of a policy of ‘revolutionary’ action, urged the RDA to follow suit and tightened their grip over RDA activities. The RDA was thus dragged into the politics of Europe’s Cold War and into deadly conflict with the French administration. From Paris, ‘tough’ administrators were sent out to Africa with instructions to suppress it. Aided enthusiastically by local officials and colons, the French administration eventually brought the RDA to its knees. Government employees, village chiefs, teachers sympathetic to the RDA were dismissed; RDA meetings were banned; elections were blatantly rigged.
The brunt of the repression, as it was called, fell on Côte d’Ivoire, the RDA stronghold. Party officials were imprisoned en masse; pro-PDCI villages found their taxes raised; even pilgrims to Mecca known to be party members were prevented from leaving. The PDCI retaliated with hunger strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, street fighting and sabotage. But they were no match for the French. The repression succeeded. In 1950, after a meeting with the Minister of Overseas France, François Mitterrand, Houphouët broke with the communists, sued for peace and decided to collaborate with the government.
All through this turbulent period, Houphouët constantly affirmed his loyalty to France. The RDA was neither anti-French in its policy, nor did it at any time demand independence. It aimed at equality for Africans within the Union Française and concentrated attacks on the dual system of voting and other forms of discrimination. The source of the conflict, Houphouët acknowledged, had been his proximity to the communists. Now that it had ended, the way was open for cooperation. ‘A new page has been turned,’ he said in 1951. ‘On it let us write a resolution to make Africa the most splendid and most loyal territory in the French Union.’
In stark contrast to Nkrumah in neighbouring Gold Coast, Houphouët made economic development rather than political reform his priority. Independence, he said, was not the best solution for Africa. He forged an alliance with the French business community, encouraging the flow of public and private French capital into Côte d’Ivoire. As the largest planter in the country, he also recognised the benefits that France could provide for his fellow farmers through trade deals. Under a 1954 agreement, coffee, which then accounted for 57 per cent of total exports, received both a quota guarantee and a price floor in metropolitan markets.
Economic growth in Côte d’Ivoire, based on coffee and cocoa exports, advanced in leaps and bounds in the postwar era. Between 1950 and 1956, the area of land devoted to cocoa production rose by 50 per cent; coffee production doubled. By 1956, Côte d’Ivoire had become by far the largest exporter of all the territories in French West Africa, providing 45 per cent of the total; Senegal came second, providing 35 per cent, mainly peanuts.
The growing prosperity of Côte d’Ivoire, however, aroused resentment there about the taxation system used by the French to support their two federations in black Africa, Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF), consisting of eight West African territories, including Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, and Afrique Equatoriale Française, a group of four territories in equatorial Africa. As the richest country in the AOF, Côte d’Ivoire paid the highest contribution. Each year it received back on average no more than 19 per cent of the money it remitted to the AOF. It calculated that if it had retained revenues sent to the AOF, it would have been able to double its budgetary income without increasing taxes.
Houphouët was determined to break the link with the AOF, to decentralise the federation. But he met strong opposition from Senghor. Senegal, where the headquarters of the AOF were based, stood to lose considerable benefits. But Senghor’s main argument was that a political federation of eight territories with a combined population of 20 million would evolve into a powerful force capable of attaining economic self-sufficiency, whereas individual countries with populations of only 3 million, like Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, would become little more than pawns.
All sides recognised the need for reform of the Union Française. French ministers were concerned that the kind of violence afflicting Algeria might surface elsewhere in Africa. The clamour for independence in Ghana and other British colonies in West Africa added to the momentum for change. ‘The natives are restless,’ the new Minister of Overseas France, Gaston Defferre, told the National Assembly in Paris in March 1956. ‘The question is not whether we should plagiarise the British, but there is no doubt that the fact that they transformed the political and administrative regime of their territories has contributed to the growth of the impatience of the people of French West and French Equatorial Africa.’
The initiative was seized by Houphouët-Boigny. As a result of the 1956 elections, his RDA group had emerged as the largest African party in the National Assembly. He was consequently awarded a full cabinet post in the new French government, able to exert considerable influence over the direction the reforms took. With Houphouët’s support, Defferre pushed through the National Assembly a loi-cadre, a ‘framework law’ enabling the government to take action by decree, thus avoiding the delays that resulted from protracted parliamentary wrangling. In the reforms subsequently introduced, France conceded universal franchise and a single college for elections. But even more important, it allowed its African territories a considerable measure of internal autonomy. Each territory acquired its own prime minister, cabinet and assembly with control over matters such as budgets, the civil service, public works and primary education.
In the process the two federations of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa were broken up. France had no intention of permitting the development of federations of African territories with enhanced powers, capable of wielding significant influence in the metropolitan parliament. Senghor accused the French government of wanting to ‘balkanise’ Africa, to maintain its control there by keeping African countries small, divided and therefore dependent. But his protests were in vain.
Nevertheless, neither Senghor nor Houphouët-Boigny nor any other African leader in l’Afrique Noire voiced support for independence from France. Africa’s involvement in the French system brought considerable benefits. In 1956 the number of deputies that black Africa sent to Paris increased to thirty-three. A year later the French government included four Africans as ministers or secretaries of state. The financial benefits bestowed by the Union Française were also of major importance. The French government paid a substantial part of administrative costs and provided subsidies for export crops. Between 1946 and 1958, more than 70 per cent of total public investment and more than 30 per cent of annual running costs were financed by France. Vast sums were spent on roads, bridges, schools, hospitals and agriculture. ‘Independence has no positive content,’ said Senghor. ‘It is not a solution.’
In April 1957, in the Ivorian capital Abidjan, a wager was made between Houphouët-Boigny, in his role as minister in the French government, and Kwame Nkrumah, paying his first official visit abroad as prime minister of newly independent Ghana. Houphouët predicted that ten years hence Côte d’Ivoire, with the assistance of France, would have surpassed its neighbour in economic and social progress. ‘You are witnessing the start of two experiments,’ Houphouët told his compatriots. ‘A wager has been made between two territories, one having chosen independence, the other preferring the difficult road to the construction, with the metropole, of a community of men equal in rights and duties . . . Let us undertake this experiment in absolute respect for the experiment of his neighbour, and in ten years we shall compare the results.’
When the Fourth Republic collapsed in 1958 and Charles de Gaulle assumed power, Houphouët became a fervent Gaullist. Though de Gaulle was preoccupied more with reaching a constitutional settlement for France to enable him to deal with Algeria, he also sought a new arrangement with l’Afrique Noire, willing to give its ruling elites more local power – internal autonomy – while leaving France effectively in control of foreign affairs, defence and overall economic policy. Under the Fifth Republic’s constitution, the name of the Union Française became the Franco-African Community, but little else changed.
Houphouët was in full agreement with de Gaulle’s strategy. He was convinced that the only effective way to safeguard the interests of Côte d’Ivoire or any other French African territory was to maintain union with France. When the draft proposals for the new constitution dealing with the Franco-African Community were being drawn up, Houphouët was the principal architect. The proposals made no mention of any territory’s right to independence. Nor did they include any scope either for a looser confederation of states or for an inter-African federation within the Community, which Senghor and others advocated.
To settle the constitutional issue, de Gaulle announced that a referendum would be held on 28 September 1958. African territories would be given a choice of voting ‘Yes’ which would commit them to permanent membership of the Community, or ‘No’ which would mean their ‘secession’ and the loss of all French assistance, effectively consigning them to economic ruin and administrative chaos. ‘Of course, I understand the attractions of independence and the lure of secession,’ he said in August. ‘The referendum will tell us whether secession carries the day. But what is inconceivable is an independent state which France continues to help.’ Given such a stark choice, virtually all African leaders could see no alternative but to accept de Gaulle’s conditions.
There was, however, one notable exception: the young Guinean leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré. He came from a different background from the intellectual Senghor and the aristocratic Houphouët-Boigny. His route to power had been not through the closeted world of the African elite but through the rough and tumble of trade union politics. From a trade union base, he had managed to build up the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) into a powerful mass movement. In the 1957 elections in Guinea the PDG had won fifty-six out of sixty seats and Touré, at the age of thirty-five, had become Guinea’s prime minister. An admirer of Nkrumah, he was far more interested in ideas of Pan-African unity than in the Franco-African Community and quickly made clear his dislike of de Gaulle’s plan. It was, he said dismissively, ‘a French Union re-baptised – old merchandise with a new label’.
When de Gaulle arrived in the Guinean capital Conakry on 25 August at the end of an African tour to campaign for a ‘Yes’ vote, he was greeted by well-marshalled crowds lining the streets from the airport shouting independence slogans. At the old white Assembly Hall he was subjected to a brash speech from Touré, attacking France’s colonial record and demanding complete decolonisation before Guinea joined the Franco-African Community. ‘We prefer poverty in freedom to riches in slavery,’ he declared to enthusiastic applause.
Deeply affronted, de Gaulle rose in reply to defend France’s record and he repeated his offer: ‘I say it here, even louder than elsewhere: independence is at Guinea’s disposal. She can take it by saying “No” to the proposal which is made to her, and in that case I guarantee that metropolitan France will raise no obstacles . . .’ He already acknowledged what the result would be. Turning to his entourage, he is said to have remarked: ‘Well gentlemen, there is a man who we shall never get on with. Come now, the thing is clear: we shall leave on 29 September, in the morning [after the referendum].’ On the way back to the airport in the same car, the two men sat tightlipped, in silence. They shook hands for the last time and de Gaulle departed with the words: ‘Adieu la Guinée!’
Soon after de Gaulle had left, Touré summed up his position. ‘Between voting “Yes” to a constitution which infringes the dignity, unity and freedom of Africa, and accepting, as General de Gaulle says, immediate independence, Guinea will choose that independence without hesitating. We do not have to be blackmailed by France. We cannot yield on behalf of our countries to those who threaten and put pressure on us to make us choose, against heart and reason, the conditions of marriage which could keep us within the complex of the colonial regime.’
In the referendum on 28 September, the vote in eleven territories went overwhelmingly in favour of de Gaulle’s proposals for a Franco-African Community. In Guinea, the vote was no less overwhelming: 95 per cent said ‘Non’. Four days later, on 2 October 1958, Guinea was proclaimed an independent republic.
De Gaulle’s reaction to Guinea’s vote was swift and vindictive. Despite polite overtures from Touré, all French aid was terminated. French civil servants and army units, including army doctors largely responsible for providing health services to the civilian population, were withdrawn. In a mass exodus, some 3,000 administrators, teachers, engineers, technicians and businessmen left the country. They took with them any French government property they could carry and destroyed what had to be left behind. Government files and records were burned; offices were stripped of furniture and telephones, even of their electric light bulbs. Army doctors took away medical supplies; police officers smashed windows in their barracks. When Touré moved into the former governor’s house, he found that the furniture and pictures had been removed and the crockery smashed. Only 150 French government employees, mostly volunteers, stayed behind.
Cast into isolation, Touré turned to the Soviet Union and other communist countries for assistance. Legions of technicians from Eastern Europe arrived. Nkrumah was ready with a large loan and proposals for a union between Ghana and Guinea. In the anti-colonial world at large, Touré was acclaimed a hero. Western mining groups expressed interest in Guinea’s mineral resources. Far from being daunted by the severe disruption Guinea faced, Touré urged other members of the Franco-African Community to demand their independence.
De Gaulle’s Community soon encountered difficulty. While France expected to run the Community as it had done in the past, African leaders wanted greater control. Senghor decided to form a federation linking Senegal with Soudan (Mali) and pressed for independence within the Community. De Gaulle at first resisted the demands, but he came to recognise that independence was, as he said ‘a sort of elementary psychological disposition’. Houphouët-Boigny held out in favour of the French Community for longer than any other African leader. ‘It is not the shell of independence which counts; it is the contents: the economic contents, the social contents and the human contents.’ But he too was swept along on the same tide.
In 1960 the eleven members of the Community, along with Cameroon and Togo, two trust territories administered by France under a United Nations mandate, were launched as independent states. French delegations hopped from one colonial capital to another to attend ceremonies lowering the tricolore and hoisting independence flags: Dahomey (later Benin) on 1 August; Niger on the 3rd; Upper Volta (later Burkina Faso) on the 5th; Côte d’Ivoire on the 7th; Chad on the 11th; the Central African Republic on the 13th; the French Congo (Brazzaville) on the 15th; Gabon on the 17th; and Senegal on the 20th. Mali followed in September and Mauritania in November.
Hardly any of these new states were economically viable. Countries like Chad, Niger and Mali were landlocked, mostly desert, thinly populated and desperately poor. Mauritania consisted of no more than desert inhabited by nomads which until 1954 had been ruled from the Senegalese city of Saint Louis. Upper Volta had only become a separate territory in 1947. Even Senegal, the second wealthiest colony in l’Afrique Noire, relied heavily on French subsidies. Only Côte d’Ivoire was thought to be economically viable on its own. The new states were also deprived of the cohesiveness that the two giant federations of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa had lent them for the past fifty years. Coastal states lost important markets; landlocked states suffered economic disruption. Instead of cooperating, they became weak rivals.
To ensure that the new states survived and that French interests there were protected, de Gaulle adopted a benevolent stand, signing agreements covering a wide range of financial and technical assistance. France supplied presidential aides, military advisers and civil servants to staff government ministries. The French treasury supported a monetary union, underwriting a stable and convertible currency. French troops were stationed permanently in several African capitals under defence agreements designed to provide a guarantee of internal security. France also operated an extensive intelligence network in Africa controlled from the Élysée Palace by de Gaulle’s African adviser, Jacques Foccart. The French continued to dominate industry, banking and trade as thoroughly as before. In the post-colonial era, l’Afrique Noire was regarded as part of France’s chasse gardée – a private estate, jealously guarded against encroachment by other world powers.
Indeed, the changes that occurred were largely ceremonial. In place of a French-controlled administration, the new states were now run by elite groups long accustomed to collaborating with the French and well attuned to French systems of management and culture. Though popularly elected, they were separated by a wide social and cultural gulf from the mass of the population. Their ambitions lay more in accumulating positions of power, wealth and status, more in developing a high bourgeoisie, than in transforming society.
No one illustrated this sense of continuity, or the benefits to be derived from it, better than Houphouët-Boigny. After serving in six successive French governments, he returned home to concentrate his attention on running Côte d’Ivoire. A glimpse of his lifestyle was provided in 1961, shortly after independence, by a correspondent for the magazine West Africa.
Far and away the most splendid residence in Africa is that of the Ivory Coast’s President, M. Houphouët-Boigny . . . Over £3 million has already been spent – out of French aid funds – and further work on the landscaping of the grounds is likely to cost a further million at least. In keeping with Houphouët’s unflamboyant nature, the palace doesn’t look so extraordinary from the street. It is in three separate buildings: the Presidency, the Residence and the reception halls. Not until the dinner-jacketed guest penetrates to the latter, past fountains, cascades, statues and descends a regal staircase into a vast marble reception hall, there to shake hands with his host and his beautiful wife, does the extent and beauty of the place register. Nothing is missing: from chandeliers and antique-style furniture in subtly contrasted colours to embossed chinaware and cutlery for over 1,000 guests, and a single table that seats hundreds . . . Many visitors – both tax-paying Frenchmen and delegations from less favoured African states – were, I am told, shocked at such extravagance. But an Ivorian journalist who inspected the palace on the day after the big reception, exclaimed: ‘My God, anyone could live here – the Queen of England, President Kennedy. It makes me thrilled to be an Ivory Coast citizen.’
In Algeria, meanwhile, the war dragged on. For all his determination to resolve the issue, de Gaulle made little progress. Five times he visited Algeria in the summer months of 1958, but, caught between the conflicting demands of the pieds noirs, the army and the Algerian nationalists, he was able to offer no clear way forward. Under the 1958 constitution, Algeria remained a group of twelve départements of France. To restore metropolitan control in Algeria, de Gaulle curbed the activities of pied noir ‘ultras’ and purged the army of dissident officers. He also announced a programme of massive economic aid, in the hope of encouraging the emergence of a ‘third force’ of moderates in the Algerian community with whom he could negotiate a viable settlement and bypass the FLN. But the middle ground had long since collapsed.
The FLN reacted to de Gaulle’s programme by intensifying guerrilla action, organising terrorist raids in France and setting up a government-in-exile, based in Tunis, appointing as its figurehead the moderate francophile Ferhat Abbas. When de Gaulle offered what he called ‘a peace of the brave’, suggesting that if FLN combatants were ‘to wave the white flag of truce’, they would be ‘treated honourably’, he was curtly rebuffed. ‘The problem of a ceasefire,’ retorted Ferhat Abbas, ‘is not simply a military problem. It is essentially political and negotiation must cover the whole question of Algeria.’
It was not until September 1959, fifteen months after his initial ‘tour of inspection’, that de Gaulle endeavoured to break the logjam. In a national broadcast he offered Algeria ‘self-determination’, setting out three possible options: Algerians would be able to choose either ‘secession’, by which he meant independence, shorn of all French assistance, like Guinea; or total integration, which he termed françisation; or a measure of internal self-government in ‘association’ with France. The outcome would be decided by a referendum to be held within four years after the restoration of peace. De Gaulle made clear his own views about how ‘disastrous’ secession would be: secession, he said, ‘would bring with it the most appalling poverty, terrible political chaos, widespread slaughter, and soon after the bellicose dictatorship of the Communists’. The most sensible course, he implied, would be ‘association’.
Whatever de Gaulle’s preference, the genie of ‘self-determination’ was now out of the bottle. In Paris his offer was widely acclaimed: the National Assembly passed a vote of confidence by a huge majority. But in Algeria it provoked fury, both within the pied noir community and within the army. For by conceding the majority Muslim population the right to decide Algeria’s fate, de Gaulle in effect signalled his willingness to accept the end of Algérie française.
After weeks of plotting, paramilitary ‘ultra’ groups took to the streets of Algiers in January 1960, setting up barricades, determined to force de Gaulle to withdraw his offer of self-determination, expecting the army to join them. But the president stood firm, demanding obedience from the army, and the insurrection – ‘Barricades Week’, as it was called – petered out.
Throughout 1960 – the sixth year of the war – de Gaulle held fast to the belief that ‘association’ could still be made to work, that he could carry the bulk of the Muslim population with him and thwart the FLN. To the FLN he renewed his offer of an ‘honourable’ ceasefire and authorised preliminary talks, but when the FLN discovered they were required to lay down arms before substantial negotiations could begin, the talks soon foundered. The FLN insisted not only on discussing political issues prior to any ceasefire but demanded recognition as the sole representative of Algerian opinion.
Striving to restore momentum, de Gaulle announced in November 1960 ‘a new course’ that would lead eventually, he said, to an Algérie Algérienne associated with France. He spoke of a République Algérienne with ‘its own government, its own institutions, its own laws’, within the French orbit. Once again, the pied noir population vented their fury. During a ‘tour of inspection’ de Gaulle made in December, riots erupted in Algiers and Oran. But what was even more significant about his visit was that the Muslim population used it as an occasion to demonstrate their support for the FLN and the cause of Algerian independence. Thousands of green-and-white FLN flags appeared in the Muslim quarters of Algiers. With unexpected ferocity, Muslim riots broke out. No longer were the French able to claim that the FLN represented nothing more than a minority clique terrorising the Algerian majority.
Concluding that there was no alternative but to negotiate with the FLN, de Gaulle agreed in February 1961 to open peace talks. The backlash this time came from within the army. In April a group of retired generals, including General Salan, the former commander-in-chief in Algeria, led a revolt against de Gaulle, seizing control of Algiers. De Gaulle stood firm once more and, after four days, the putsch collapsed.
The failure of the putsch, however, brought dissident officers into alliance with ‘ultra’ groups. Using the name Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), they launched a campaign of terror targeted mainly at the Muslim population, trying to provoke FLN reprisals against the French that would lead to the intervention of the army and the collapse of de Gaulle’s entire strategy. The OAS gained the support of much of the pied noir population in cities such as Algiers and Oran. For month after month, the killing and bombing continued. OAS terror was matched by counter-terror carried out both by French ‘barbouzes’ – underground government agents – and by the FLN. The gulf of hatred between Muslim and European widened ever further. Metropolitan France was caught up in a similar cycle of violence. Numerous attempts were made to assassinate de Gaulle.
Negotiations meanwhile proceeded in fits and starts. De Gaulle at first tried to keep hold of the Sahara with its huge oil and gas reserves. He demanded a special status for the pieds noirs, even proposing partition at one stage. But with his negotiating position steadily weakening, he was forced to yield on one issue after another. By early 1962, as the carnage continued, he resolved to get rid of the ‘Algerian problem’ at the earliest possible date. On 18 March a deal agreeing to Algeria’s independence was signed at Evian. De Gaulle told his cabinet it was ‘an honourable exit’.
But the agreement did not bring peace. In a final paroxysm of violence, the OAS took revenge on the Muslim population, bombing and murdering at random, destroying schools, libraries and hospital facilities, attacking florists’ stalls and grocery shops, determined to leave behind nothing more than ‘scorched earth’. Whatever slim chance of reconciliation between pieds noirs and Algerians there had been was snuffed out.
In the mass exodus that followed, more than a million pieds noirs fled to France, many leaving with no more than what they could carry in suitcases. Farms, homes and livelihoods were abandoned en masse. Amid the retreat, thousands of harkis – Muslims who had fought on France’s side – were slaughtered by FLN groups in an orgy of revenge.
Thus the French departed, in chaos and confusion, after eight years of war which had cost half a million lives. On 5 July 1962 Algeria attained its independence under the control of a revolutionary government.