The French intifada

The Second World War was both a shock and a trauma to all sides in Algeria. Most terrifying of all was the Fall of France in 1940. No one had seen this coming or prepared for what might happen next. In one fell swoop the settlers lost the nation that gave them political legitimacy. The hopes of Algerian Muslims had already been dashed by the failure of the Blum–Viollette Plan, and they clearly expected little from an aggressive Germany whose main aim seemed to be to take over as much of the French Empire at it could: the Germans, too, were Europeans, and they too were Imperialists. On the other hand, Muslims took note of the fact that the French, who had dominated their lives for so long, were no longer invulnerable.

The colons were terrified that the Fall of France might mean the break-up of the colonial administration. They were relieved when, on June 25 1940, it was announced that Germany would preserve the integrity of the French Empire. Straight away, the majority of colons threw themselves behind the Vichy government of Marshal Pétain. No German soldiers were stationed in Algeria and it was easy for the colons to believe that Vichy meant a return to order in France and the possibility of organizing a military retaliation against Germany. In Algeria it was possible to be pro-Vichy and anti-German.

The French government’s delegate in Algeria was General Weygand, who was a patriotic soldier and, it was understood, fiercely anti-German. After the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940, the French army in Algeria was increased to 120,000 men, incorporating different races, which was larger than the French army on the mainland and gave rise to the fantasy that Weygand was planning to save France from Algeria.

Weygand was removed from his post in 1941 under German pressure on the French authorities (he had opposed German encroachments on Algerian soil). Although the Vichy government immediately lost prestige among the colons, Pétainism remained alive as a political credo. Above all, many of the colons admired Pétain for his call for a ‘National Revolution’ – a return to the land, family and patriotism as the central values of Frenchness, which was what many French Algerians had been arguing for all along. The southern European population of Algeria – Spaniards, Sardinians, Maltese – whose sympathy during the Spanish Civil War had been with General Franco, saw Pétain playing the same role in France. In the cafés of Bab-el-Oued, over glasses of beer and anisette, the received wisdom was that Pétain was a crafty fox who had outwitted Hitler; ‘The old man’s got the better of Adolf!’ was a common refrain.1

There was also a small minority of Algerian Muslims who supported the Vichy government, partly because they found Pétain’s emphasis on authority reassuring and partly because they were hoping for political concessions. Both the colons and the Algerian Muslims were happy to accept the anti-Jewish laws that the Pétain government so shamefully and swiftly put into place. On 7 October 1940, when anti-Semitism had been legally ratified by Vichy, the Minister of the Interior repealed the Crémieux Decree, which had given Jews in Algeria the right to French citizenship. Most colons were delighted to carry out the anti-Semitic policies of Vichy and did so with an enthusiasm that occasionally shocked the German authorities in France; in Algiers, however, anti-Semitism had long been a casual fact of daily life.

At the beginning of the war, most Algerian Muslims had pledged their allegiance to France, despite misgivings. They mainly saw the conflict as the unfinished business of the First World War, and even the most radical Nationalists preferred to deal with the French government rather than with an even more alien foreign power. Their view changed when the Vichy régime came to power. Although some Muslims were elected to its Conseil National, most of them opposed the government, not because it was clearly morally and politically vicious, but because it was evident that Vichy had no interest in the Nationalist ambitions of Algerian Muslims. Pétain’s government appealed to Messali Hadj to collaborate, with the promise of future concessions. He refused on the grounds that he was in favour of an independent Algerian nation and not a colony. In March 1941 he was sentenced to sixteen years of hard labour. Algerian Muslims saw this as yet another savage betrayal.

The authority of the Vichy government and the triumphalism of the settlers were, however, short-lived. In 1942 Algeria fell to British and American troops as part of Operation Torch, the mass Allied landings in North Africa which would prove to be a turning point of the war and the launch pad for the Allied assault on southern Europe. The Allies landed at Sidi-Ferruch, as the French had over a century earlier. The troops disembarked in the shadow of the Stars and Stripes and brought with them military armour and organization which impressed the Algerian Nationalists, who watched impassively as the Vichy régime mounted a disjointed if sometimes murderous resistance. The British and American troops were pinned down on the beach for several hours by sniper fire, and commanders feared the arrival of German paratroopers in support of the French. When Marshal Pétain heard the news in Vichy, he told the American consul: ‘France and her honour are at stake. We are attacked. We shall defend ourselves. This is the order I am giving.’

Operation Torch was politically challenging. Although there were no Germans in French North Africa, it was not clear how much resistance the Vichy troops would put up. The American consul in Algiers, Robert Daniel Murphy, reported that the mood in the city was anti-German and that resistance would be minimal. He also made secret contact with senior French officials in Algiers who confirmed this view. But the Americans were also vehemently opposed to General de Gaulle and his Free French forces, who had already infiltrated Chad, Congo and Cameroon, and wanted to avoid installing him in power in Algeria at all costs. Instead they made friends with hard-line right-wingers, some of them members of the monarchist Action Française.

To make matters even more complicated, the Americans and British had initially been reluctant to take part in Operation Torch, favouring a single Second Front with a big push into occupied Europe. The Soviet Union made the argument that an assault in North Africa would take the pressure off its own hard-pressed troops and divert the German forces towards the south, trapping the German army in Egypt and preparing the ground for the assault on northern Europe. Churchill was finally persuaded that North Africa was the ‘soft underbelly’ of Europe, and convinced Roosevelt in turn. However, the British role in the operation was reduced so as not to antagonize Vichy France, which had been hostile to Britain ever since the sinking of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940. Operation Torch was constructed as a simultaneous amphibious landing, with the Allied forces seizing the ports and airports of Casablanca, Oran and Algiers. By the evening of 8 November 1942, after firefights with Vichy troops in the suburbs and in the main squares of Algiers, the city was under the control of the Allies.

The invasion of Algiers was none the less a tense affair. Originally the Americans had wanted to place Henri Giraud, a conservative, anti-German anti-Gaullist in power. Giraud, however, missed his rendezvous with the American submarine that was to pick him up in southern France and was stranded in Gibraltar as the landings took place. The Americans suspected that this was a ploy and that Giraud was waiting to see what happened in Algiers and wanted no responsibility for having French blood on his hands.

As the American warships prepared to land in Algiers, it became known that the pro-Pétain Admiral François Darlan was in Algiers, visiting his son, who was ill with polio. Darlan, who until two months earlier had been commander of the Vichy forces, seized control of the situation and declared to the population of Algiers that the Americans would never dare to enter the city. When they did, he called in the Luftwaffe (who never came) and ordered the Vichy troops to fight back; 1,356 Frenchman and 456 Allied troops were killed before Darlan ordered a ceasefire.

Darlan was a vain and ambitious man, who was quickly persuaded by the Americans to sign an accord giving him control over North Africa. The British were unhappy with this – Darlan was a clear collaborationist – but they were not quite as furious as Pétain himself, whose power started ebbing away as the Germans invaded the ‘Free Zone’ of France in response to the American victory in Algeria.

Darlan did not last long in power: he was shot in dead on Christmas Eve 1942 by Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, allegedly a monarchist and a member of the French Resistance. In turn, Bonnier was mysteriously shot on Boxing Day. Algiers buzzed with rumours and conspiracy theories. Chief among them was the story that this was a plot by the British Secret Service to stage a coup d’état in Algiers. Whatever the intrigue, the Americans could now install their chosen candidate – General Giraud, who had finally arrived in Algiers to take command.

On the ground, the Allied invasion of North Africa was the first time that Anglo-American cultures had properly been engaged in this part of the world. For the ordinary soldiers, the military operation in Algiers was their introduction to the reality of the Arab world.

Although the Americans saw the Maghreb through the prism of French colonial politics, it was also – as it had been for the French before them – the source of fantasy as an exotic, intriguing and sexualized world of its own. Hollywood had recently picked up on the popular taste for tales from this newly discovered Oriental playground. In 1938 the film Algiers, an Americanized version of Pépé Le Moko, starring Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr, had given cinema-goers a glimpse of the lurid life of the Casbah. This was followed in 1942 by The Road to Morocco, a musical comedy with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, and by Casablanca, both of which were released to take advantage of the newsworthiness of Operation Torch.

American soldiers inevitably tended to see this first meeting with the Arab world in terms of Hollywood images and what they knew of ‘native American’ cultures. In the pages of the New Yorker, A. J. Liebling recorded the views of a soldier called Bill Phelps from Twenty-Nine Palms, California. Phelps observed of the dry and dusty landscape: ‘This is exactly the way it is back home, except that back home we don’t got no Ayrabs.’

As the Allies settled in for the occupation, ordinary soldiers came into closer contact with the Muslim population, but it tended to be limited to touts and street traders. In the official US Army newspaper, ‘the Arab’ was referred to as an amusing sub-species, servile but essentially harmless; there was no insight into the anger of the colonized population, who were portrayed as a weak and emasculated race:

If the Arab was often a pest and pretty generally a nuisance, he nevertheless was indispensable. He shined our shoes, sold us oranges, delivered eggs to our front lines right through enemy fire, and continually reminded us what blessings we had in the form of chewing gum, chocolate and cigarettes. Above all he provided the American soldier with plenty of jokes … Actually the Arab was a spectator in last winter’s grim business. You can chalk that spectator attitude up to history, of which he has seen quite a lot. He used to be a fighting man himself but that was a long time ago, when the zeal of the Prophet Mohammed’s followers expressed itself in a continuous brandishing of the sword. Since that time he has learned to wage his campaigns with oranges, eggs, dates, almonds and shoeshine boxes rather than with hand grenades and howitzers. The North African Arab hasn’t been intimately mixed up in a first-class war for centuries now, having been by and large content to let the other races do the squabbling … It’s a fair assumption that he has developed by this time what could be called a neutral attitude.2

The Anglo-American fantasy of the ‘Orient’ also included sex. But this, too, was a disappointment. Sergeant Len Scott had sailed from Liverpool to Algiers on board SS Duchess of Richmond with over 6,000 infantrymen. He recorded his initial amazement at the beauty of Algiers, the stench of the city, their first encounters with ‘natives’, and the unalluring reality of the fabled veiled women of the Orient:

It was on my twenty-ninth birthday that I saw Algiers. How beautiful it looked in the clear, hard sunlight, the white buildings stretching around a bay, buildings separated by groves of cypress and palm. How surprised were most of us at its unlooked-for size and outward splendour … Western architecture for the most part, with a few minarets as Islamic exclamation-marks. All that day we stood off from the shore until the white walls turned bluish and the lengthening shadows crept across the city. We docked at last but not until the following morning did we make physical contact with Africa – on Friday 13 November! That floating white purity when seen far off, became a nasal offence. We […] admired the view – the sea on one side and the Kasbah on the other … a higgledy-piggledy heap of white buildings and grim little alleys climbing up a hill. Figures moved on the flat roofs – Arab women washing their linen. Picturesque, but if the wind were blowing from that direction we did not linger.

The Kasbah was out of bounds [off-limits] to all military personnel. Legends circulated – maybe more than legends – about soldiers who had tried to ‘chat up’ Arab women and whose bodies, when discovered, lacked certain organs. The ordinary British soldier had a half-contemptuous, half-amused attitude towards the ‘natives’. We were unaware that ‘Arabs’ were sometimes Berbers.

The veiled women aroused little erotic interest. Most of those appearing in public were obviously so old and fat that the veil was a kindness. ‘I’ll get one for my old woman when I get home,’ was a common remark.3

Algerian Muslims, in contrast, greeted their new conquerors with curiosity and also the hope that they might lead them to freedom from the French. In the days before the landings at Sidi-Ferruch, Ferhat Abbas had made several visits to Consul Robert Murphy, seeking reassurance that the invasion would be the prelude to Algerian independence. Murphy could never give such an assurance, but the dream of freedom persisted.

Algerians noted, however, the racial segregation among the US forces. The contradiction between the American claim to bring freedom and the fact of racism had long been reported in the Chicago Defender, the most influential Afro-American newspaper in the United States. The landings in North Africa were celebrated in the columns of the Defender as a return to the homeland. One cartoon showed Hitler fleeing across the desert pursued by a black soldier in US army uniform, a barefoot African wearing a fez and an Arab wielding a scimitar. There was a kind of truth at work here: from now on Algeria was the base for Allied troops to fight the desert war in Tunisia. But the notion that this was a multiracial coalition against European racism, incarnate in Nazism, was no more than a fantasy, and would soon be revealed as such by events.4

* * *

In 1942 the European population of Algeria, somewhat grudgingly, switched sides. Giraud was a conservative and popular with the colons, who saw him as continuing the old order. He spoke Arabic and also had an admiration and affection for Islam and the ‘natives’. Combined with his visceral anti-Semitism, this made him reluctant to change the anti-Jewish laws established under the Vichy régime. It was only in 1943, as de Gaulle began to establish his authority, that the Crémieux Decree was reinstated and Algerian Jews regained their French citizenship. In the meantime, the Muslims were encouraged to join the Allied forces, which they did with unbridled enthusiasm, believing the Americans would soon be their liberators. On 15 August 1944 several hundred thousand Algerian Muslims landed on the beaches of Normandy. Under the flag of the United States, they fought and died for the French nation – a country that most of them had never seen and where they had no status as citizens.

As part of his strategy to reclaim all the French territories that had been under the control of Vichy, General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, visited Algeria in 1943. He saw straight away the dangers of an angry and mutinous native population and set up a commission for Muslim reforms. The commission promised that French citizenship would be given to tens of thousands of Muslims at the end of the war in recognition of their sacrifices for France, the Mother Nation. The colons reacted angrily, arguing that de Gaulle was abandoning them. But he went even further, promising two-fifths Muslim representation in local assemblies and governing authorities.

By 1943 this was already too late. Betrayed by Paris, Vichy and ultimately America, the veteran Nationalist and liberal reformer Ferhat Abbas had hardened his position and demanded a completely new status for his country. He joined forces with Messali Hadj and together they drew up a manifesto for a New Algeria. Their demands were unequivocal: they both wanted an autonomous republic with the same status as any other nation in the world. There was to be no negotiation.

At the end of hostilities, Algeria will be set up as an Algerian state endowed with its own constitution, which will be elaborated by an Algerian constituent assembly, elected by universal suffrage by all the inhabitants of Algeria.5

This was obviously unacceptable both to the colons and to Paris. There was to be no more dialogue between the Algerian Nationalists and the French. Having only recently been released from prison, Messali Hadj found himself deported to Brazzaville in the Congo. Meanwhile, Ferhat Abbas continued to organize for a future Algeria free of the French.

* * *

The end of the war also brought famine to Algeria. There had been bad harvests in 1944 and 1945, exacerbated by the deprivations of wartime. In the winter and spring of 1945, thousands of hungry peasants swarmed into the towns and villages, desperate for food and shelter. They congregated around soup kitchens set up by supporters of Abbas and Hadj. Along with the soup, the Nationalists ladled out propaganda: the French were deliberately starving the Muslims, the French would never give up Algeria, the Americans were traitors, freedom would never come. The atmosphere in Algiers was heavy with the promise of violence, which soon turned into real killing on both sides. The future of France would come to be determined by events in Algiers, but for the time being most Parisians cared very little about events so far away, until the betrayals in Algeria found their violent echo in the streets of Paris.

The catastrophe began in 1945 with a vague report of a massacre in Sétif, in the Constantine area of Algeria. Sétif was then not much more than an obscure market town set on a bleak and treeless plain. In the words of Harold Macmillan, who had passed through in 1943 in his capacity as the Minister Resident in North Africa, it was ‘a town of no great interest’.6

On 8 May 1945, at around 8 o’clock in the morning, a crowd of some 10,000 Muslims from Sétif and the surrounding villages started gathering. The German High Command had finally surrendered the night before, heralding the VE Day celebrations in Europe. The demonstrations in Sétif began quietly enough, with a flurry of British, French and Russian flags on parade. There were placards in French with slogans such as ‘Free Messali!’, ‘We want to be your equals!’, ‘Down with colonialism!’, but this was nothing that the police had not seen before. Sétif had long been an occasional base for Algerian Nationalists, and anti-French sentiment was a staple of daily life here. The marchers had been granted permission to parade as long there were no anti-French slogans, and no flag other than the French or those of the Allied nations was allowed. The police tolerated the singing of the Nationalist anthem, ‘Min Dijbalina’ (‘From our Mountains’), which accompanied the first marchers.

Then, around 8.45 a.m., the mood – tense but unthreatening – suddenly changed as Aissa Cheraga, a young Muslim, unveiled the Algerian flag at the head of the parade. When the marchers reached the Café de France in the centre of town, a police commissar called Olivieri tried to seize the flag. Scuffles broke out, punches were thrown and Olivieri was knocked to the ground. There were gunshots from the police and from the crowd, and then a twenty-six-year-old Muslim, Bouzid Saal, staggered out of the parade, dripping with blood, clutching an Algerian flag, and fell to the floor, shot dead.

Rage and panic now overwhelmed the marchers and the Europeans who had gathered to watch or police the parade. The crowd of Muslims drew guns, staves and knives, and with the cry ‘N’katlou ennessara’ (‘Kill the Europeans!’) launched themselves at passers-by and the police. The riot went on through the afternoon and by early evening had spread to the neighbouring town of Guelma.

The riot sparked a general uprising in which over a hundred Europeans were killed in five days of fighting. The Muslims across the region were ferocious – it was if the rage of over a hundred years was now being unleashed in this paroxysm of violence. This was the Europeans’ worst nightmare, as even trusted servants and employees turned against their masters in a bloody festival of unexpiated guilt, shame and terror. Many of the Europeans had their throats slit and were horribly mutilated. Men were castrated, genitals stuffed down their throats and women were raped. Even moderates from the Communist and Socialist parties had their hands chopped off. The local religious leaders had called it a jihad and declared that it was a religious duty of all Muslims to kill all unbelievers – ‘Kill them all!’

* * *

It was bad luck, but no coincidence, that this uprising started on VE Day. In Paris, understandably, all news from abroad was lost in a seemingly endless swirl of dancing, drinking, kisses and celebrations. Very few people were aware of what was happening in Algeria, which was technically a part of France. No Paris newspaper thought it necessary to send a correspondent there. De Gaulle himself shrugged off the events ‘as a beginning of insurrection, occurring in the Constantinois, […] snuffed out by Governor-General Chataigneau.’7

This ‘snuffing-out’ was merciless. Over the next few weeks nearly 6,000 Muslims were slaughtered by the French army, who wished to show ‘a strong hand’ (and possibly avenge recent humiliation by the Germans). The French troops were aided by American forces, who helped ‘evacuate’ Europeans from sensitive areas before allowing the French soldiers free rein. Radio Cairo reported that more than 45,000 were killed – a figure which was then taken as a fact by Algerian Nationalists. The insurrection finally came to an end on 22 March 1946. The army then organized public spectacles during which local Muslim men were forced at gunpoint to prostrate themselves before a French flag and declare, ‘I am a dog and Ferhat Abbas is a dog.’

For Algerians, the massacre at Sétif revealed the true face of ‘French Algeria’. In France Albert Camus was one of the few to raise his voice in protest, writing in the journal Combat on 22 May 1945: ‘The Arab people exist and they have the same right to the democratic principles that we claim for ourselves.’8 He argued that this was a crisis and not an isolated incident, and that the Arab was not inferior to the European simply ‘because of the condition he lives in’. He recognized that from now on nothing could ever be the same again between Europeans and Muslims. The poet and journalist Kateb Yacine, recalling the massacre as an adult, wrote:

My sense of humanity was affronted. I was sixteen years old. The shock which I felt at the pitiless butchery that caused the deaths of thousands of Muslims, I have never forgotten. From that moment on my nationalism took definite form.9

In the wake of Sétif, the colons were in an even stronger position of power. This did not make them any more generous when it came to reforming the status of Muslims. Instead, they pursued a policy of control, containment and coercion. Crucially, with the tacit backing of the government in metropolitan France, the colons did their best to ensure that they held the majority vote on all matters. Their tactics included electoral fraud and corruption at all levels. Meanwhile, many Algerian Nationalists who had seen their leaders humiliated and their people massacred, went underground. The thirst for revenge was more powerful than ever, but this was also the time to watch, wait, arm and train.

For the time being, the conflict in Algeria was limited mainly to skirmishes between French forces and the rival Nationalist forces of the Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) and the new and more potent Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). During the late 1940s and early 1950s Nationalists moved between Paris, Algiers and Cairo, studying the currents of pan-Arab nationalism in Egypt and gauging the mood of the Left and of people across France. They concluded that a war against French Algeria, and probably also against France, was the only solution to their suffering, and began to plan their opening moves. The explosion would surely come. It was now only a matter of time.