15

De Gaulle and the French Civil War

May 1958 was fervid and crackling with tension in both Paris and Algiers. On 9 May came news of the assassination of three French soldiers by the FLN. This event galvanized the pieds noirs to new heights of vengeful rhetoric against Muslims. The military itself was at breaking point, more ready than ever to turn against its political masters in Paris and take matters into its own hands. The high command despatched a telegram to the Chief of Staff in Paris, urging the government not to ‘abandon’ Algeria and betray the soldiers who had made such a sacrifice. This communiqué also contained a threat: no one could predict the actions the army might commit in ‘outrage’ or ‘despair’. If the army were to intervene directly in French politics, this would be the first time that it done so since the 18th Brumaire, the coup d’état of 1799 when Napoleon seized control of the French Directory.

On 13 May a ceremony for the dead soldiers was to be held at the Monument des Morts, the grim memorial in the gardens in the centre of Algiers. Behind the memorial stood a bust of Marianne and the great white building of the Gouvernement-général – the symbolic seat of all French power in Algeria.

The ceremony was due to start at 6 p.m. In the hours leading up to the event, the streets of Algiers were packed with pieds noirs, many of them poor farmers from the interior. They had come not to support the French government but to show how much they hated its policies of appeasement towards the Muslims, and to display the power that they held as the true owners of Algérie française. Their cars buzzed around the city streets, sounding their horns to the slogan ‘AL-GER-IE FRAN-ÇAISE!’ After the laying of the wreath, the tall, wiry figure of the hard-line student leader Pierre Lagaillarde, wearing a military uniform and flanked by four tough-looking harki minders, leapt up and called the mob to attack the Gouvernement-général. Regular French troops stood back as the mob surged forward, knocking over the bust of Marianne on the way. Lagaillarde was next seen on the balcony, presiding over the anarchy that he had unleashed. For a few days, this building held the world’s attention as it waited for the next French Revolution.1

Paris was also watching, nervously and in confusion. To most Parisian eyes, the seizing of the Gouvernement-général, with its smashed windows and scattered papers and documents, ominously resembled the sacking of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris by the Communards in 1870. The right-wing Le Figaro wrote drily of ‘Dramatic events’ in Algiers. The headlines of the Communist newspaper L’Humanité warned of a Fascist coup. There were also shaky memories of the riots in Paris in 1934, the last time that a mob had nearly seized power in France.

By 27 May 1958 there was a brief but very real threat of civil war in France; the conflict between those who wanted to keep Algeria ‘French’ and those who favoured Independence was heightened when General Salan ordered his troopers from Algiers to Corsica, a short distance from the mainland. This was no longer just about Algeria but about whether France could maintain its integrity: the ‘state of France’ itself was at stake. Parisians, fearing the revenge of the army in Algeria, watched the skies for incoming aircraft, the prelude to a coup d’état. The writer Simone de Beauvoir, companion of Sartre, recorded in her diary that she had dreams of a python dropping on her from the sky.2

The real aim of Salan’s manoeuvre, however, was to force the hand of Charles de Gaulle, who was drawn out of retirement, acclaimed as the hero of the ‘Great Nation’ and, in January 1959, given a mandate to establish a Fifth Republic.

Within a month de Gaulle flew to Algiers, where he was welcomed with delirious enthusiasm by crowds who saw him as the saviour of French Algeria. In a speech delivered to the packed streets of central Algiers, he famously declared, ‘Je vous ai compris!’ (‘I have understood you!’). Most French Algerians went wild at this statement, believing it to be an expression of solidarity. In fact, it was anything but, and de Gaulle was already planning the end of war, which would mean compromise and ultimately the independence of Algeria.

In the meantime, through the summer of 1958, France itself was the target of a concerted terrorist assault by the FLN. In August and September alone, there were 181 attacks on buildings and assassination attempts on 242 people. These attacks happened all over France – a train was derailed at Cagnes-sur-Mer; police headquarters came under fire in Lyons; bombs were placed in boats in Marseilles – but Paris was the main target. The FLN were unafraid to break cover and shoot policemen and politicians in the heart of the city. There were notable exchanges of fire in Avenue Friedland, Place de l’Etoile and the rue de Rivoli. A bomb was found and defused in the ladies’ lavatory on the upper level of the Eiffel Tower.

Parisians lived through this with a mixture of anger and cynicism. The Communist Left denounced the FLN’s actions. The police worked harder than ever to track down all Algerians in the city as suspects. The cruel mood of the moment is captured by the writer Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, who described an Algerian who had been stabbed (no one knows by whom), dying in a pool of blood outside the chic Brasserie Lipp, all of this observed by a nearby flower vendor ‘shuffling in the gore and offering his faded bouquets for sale, as if it were a scene from a Surrealist picture’.3

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De Gaulle’s first proposed solution was an honourable peace and reform of the constitution to give universal suffrage and two-thirds Algerian Muslim representation in Paris. The wounded response of the FLN was to set up a provisional government in Tunis, led by Ferhat Abbas. The FLN also began to mobilize in Morocco and Tunisia, taking advantage of the fluid borders to train paramilitary units who were receiving Chinese and Russian weaponry.

Throughout 1958 and 1959, de Gaulle made frequent appearances on French television and radio, declaring ‘auto-determination’ as the solution in Algeria. In truth, de Gaulle was frustrated: his vision of post-war France was as a nuclear power and world leader, a counterbalance to Anglo-American hegemony and Soviet imperialism. To his inner circle, he was visibly irritated at being pinned down in a messy and brutal war which only harmed France’s international prestige. Still, in public he did his best to hold together the loyalty of the army, the quarrelling factions in Algiers and Paris and, most troubling of all, the murderous extremists among the settlers, many of whom understood the FLN’s refusal to compromise as a statement of intent: this was a deadly fight to the finish.

By 1960 the French army was convinced that it had won the war. They cited as proof the ‘pacified’ areas of the countryside around Oran, where civilian vehicles could move freely without military escort. Some members of the FLN also started to believe the French propaganda and broke ranks to begin negotiations with de Gaulle. These were a failure, but the beginning of a hope for peace on both sides.

Peace, however, was precisely what the extremist settlers did not want. The anger of the pieds noir erupted into violence in January 1960. Convinced that de Gaulle was about to betray them, the various factions of hard-core settlers came together to defy the French military authorities, then under the command of General Maurice Challe. The insurrection began on 23 January, a Sunday evening. At around 6 p.m. the demonstrators gathered in Bab-el-Oued and started moving towards the centre of the city, intending to confront the police and the government. The demonstrators were armed and were buzzing with the ambition to ‘se payer un gendarme’ (kill a cop). As the police moved down towards Bab-el-Oued to block the demonstration, shots seemed to come out of nowhere. Home-made bombs were lobbed at the gendarmes from balconies, and petrol bombs rolled towards them in the street. On the fifth floor of a smart building a woman in a dressing gown was spotted, shooting at the police randomly with a revolver. Wounded policemen who crawled into stairwells were mercilessly despatched by the pied noir youths who had been waiting for them.

As the violence escalated, and dead bodies were to be seen on the boulevard Laferrière, General Challe declared Algiers to be under a state of siege. Barricades went up around the centre of Algiers: this was the ‘semaine des barricades’ (Week of the Barricades).

There was a strangely festive atmosphere to the rebellion – the whole of pied-noir Algiers came down into the streets to talk, argue and drink (much alcohol was dispensed by the barmen of the Saint-Georges and Aletti hotels). But for all the bonhomie, this was a fatal moment: the first time in the conflict Frenchmen had fired upon and killed each other. There were dark memories of the Second World War and the Commune of 1870. Some insurgents noted that there were no Muslims on the streets, although occasionally the slogan ‘AL-GE-RIE AR-ABE!’ could be heard chanted from the depths of the Casbah, a parody of the slogan of the pieds noirs.

There was a great deal of confusion. This was expressed in the dying words of an Algiers policeman: ‘For two years I’ve been fighting against the Fellagha [the FLN]. Now I’m dying at the hands of those who cry Algérie Française. I don’t understand…’4 Among those who did indeed cry ‘Algérie Française’ was Jean-Marie Le Pen, the future leader of the Front National from the 1970s onwards, who was then an aspiring politician. Le Pen argued that the barricades should be extended to Paris.

De Gaulle was furious and refused to acknowledge the insurgents’ demands. Eventually, on 29 January 1960, he gave a masterly and unbending speech, describing the insurrection as ‘stab in the back for France’ and denouncing the rebels as ‘liars and conspirators’. The rebellion faded away as most of its leaders were imprisoned or went underground. In his speech, de Gaulle had also made it clear that the independence of Algeria would be the choice of Algerians. This, of course, only hardened the will of the pieds noirs.

Later that year, the leaders who remained free began to organize themselves in Algiers and Oran into a group which called itself Front de l’Algérie Française (FAF) and included political veterans such as Jacques Soustelle and military men, notably General Jouhaud and General Salan. The FAF declared de Gaulle a traitor to French Algeria. When he visited Algeria that year, the FAF launched a series of assassination attempts. The organization was swiftly banned by the French authorities, only to be replaced by the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), probably founded in Madrid. Led by the now exiled Salan, it vowed to bring French Algeria to war with France.

The Knife Edge

The OAS very nearly achieved its aims. In the early hours of 22 April 1961, the 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment announced that it had seized control of government and military facilities in Algiers, taking the local army and civil commanders captive. General Maurice Challe had come out of retirement and flown to Algiers to lead the putsch, declaring himself sole authority in Algeria and the Sahara. De Gaulle was stunned that Challe, who had stood firm against the rioters during the ‘Week of the Barricades’, should take the lead in this way. The military and civilians in Algeria and France watched with bated breath. Crucially, the army in France declared its loyalty to de Gaulle and the putsch collapsed before it had begun. But it was yet another dangerous moment for France.

The failure of the putsch did not mean that the war was over. Instead, the Algerian conflict was transformed into a triangular configuration, with the FLN against the French and the OAS, and the OAS at war with the French security forces. In Algiers, the OAS had set up an élite death squad, drawn from the prisons, the criminal underworld and rogue military men, which they called DELTA. The death squad targeted not just Muslims but leftist Europeans and the more liberal elements in the police. They took their cue from the Afrikaners who supported apartheid, and the Zionist group Haganah. More precisely, they admired Haganah – a Jewish paramilitary force which took on both the British forces in Palestine and the Arab population – for taking the fight to the enemy. DELTA terrorists regularly and casually gunned down innocent Muslims in the streets of Algiers, which – like all other Algerian cities – was under curfew and where only killers on both sides moved around at night.

The violence intensified in Algiers through the winter and spring of 1962. Many of the OAS gunmen were no more than boys – teenagers who had been given weapons by senior figures in the organization and ordered to kill as many Muslims as they could. These youthful assassins loafed around the city or the beach in the daytime and then prowled the Muslim quarters when darkness fell. In the morning the streets were often littered with Muslim corpses. By the summer of 1962, the OAS had formulated a scorched-earth policy, which culminated in attacks on the town hall of Oran, setting oil refineries alight and burning the University Library in Algiers to the ground.

In Paris, both DELTA and other operatives of the OAS now singled out left-leaning intellectuals who were sympathetic to the Algerian cause. For the next two years the crack of plastic explosives echoed around the Left Bank, as the campaign intensified. The effect of the OAS’s campaign was largely counter-productive: Parisians could not tolerate terror on their home ground and were sickened by the attack on the pharmacy on the Champs-Elysées or the bombing of newspaper offices.

The Parisian police responded by cracking down harder on the city’s Algerian population. Disastrously, on 5 October 1961 Maurice Papon imposed a curfew on all ‘French Muslims of North-African appearance’. Any Algerian on the streets after 8.30 p.m. was now considered a suspect by the law. Posters appeared across the city with the warning: ‘Algerian worker! Do you think that these killings will make your life better? They will only make it worse!’ This police propaganda was made all the more offensive by addressing its immigrant readership with the ‘tu’ form, a vocabulary for children, servants and animals.

This policy had terrible consequences. On 17 October tens of thousands of Algerians gathered in the centre of the city to demonstrate for peace and independence. They were mainly poor people, most of them flooding into the city on foot from the suburbs. The police response was harsh, and in a terrible echo of the evacuation of Jews to the Vél d’Hiv, Papon organized police trucks and wagons to take away demonstrators to the Stade de Coubertin, the Palais des Sports and the Château de Vincennes, where they were savagely beaten up. On the pont de Neuilly a skirmish between demonstrators and police became a riot. Heavily armed police charged into the crowd, killing two and wounding many more. The police then began to kill Algerians, throwing their bodies into the Seine.

This conflict was later dignified with the name ‘the Battle for Paris’, but it was really just another massacre in a long line of Parisian mass-murders. Papon’s priority was to cover up all evidence of police wrongdoing. The morning after the demonstration, a small group of Communist militants – all Europeans – led by the writer Arthur Adamov and the actor Jean-Marie Binoche set out to paint the slogan ‘This is where we kill Algerians!’ on the bridge, before retreating back to the Old Navy bar on the boulevard Saint-Germain. The slogan was quickly wiped away, but the police could not destroy all the evidence of the killings. The bloated corpses of Algerians were regularly found by ordinary Parisians over the coming weeks and months.

‘Paris was weird, much weirder than I thought it would be,’ I was told by the English artist Harold Chapman, now a distinguished photographer but then a young student come to Paris for a taste of bohemia. ‘There were police and soldiers everywhere. It was not free at all; it was a very tense place. Worst of all was the sense that something bad was happening but you couldn’t be sure what it was. October 1961 was like a hazy nightmare in Paris. The hatred of Arabs was very clear among the police – they were cracking heads all over the place.’5

There was more to come. On 7 February 1962 a bomb aimed at Jean-Paul Sartre’s apartment on the rue Bonaparte went off by mistake on the wrong floor of his building, injuring a four-year-old girl who had been playing with her dolls. Her disfigured features, cut by shards of glass and splinters of hot metal, appeared on the front pages of all the French newspapers. The editorial of Le Figaro spoke for the nation when it declared: ‘France wants no more of this!’6

Against police orders, a demonstration against the OAS was hastily organized for the next day, attracting Parisians from all walks of life. It far exceeded the numbers that the police could properly handle. Inevitably, the crowd began to spin out of control around the Bastille and boulevard Beaumarchais. The police responded the only way they knew how –indiscriminately clubbing demonstrators, throwing marble-topped café tables and iron tree guards at the terrorized crowd. A group of demonstrators who tried to shelter in the Charonne metro station were pursued by police, beaten up, crushed against metal railings and their broken bodies tossed on to the tracks. There were eight dead, including a postal worker, an apprentice and a railway worker. Their funerals on 18 February were attended by over half a million people. This was the biggest public demonstration since the violent anti-government riots of 1934. No French government could allow the Algerian war to spill over any further or spread any deeper into French life.

Bitter Victory

In December 1961 both sides had met in the small village of Les Rousses, high up in the Jura mountains of Switzerland, less than a kilometre from the French border and a short drive to Geneva. The location was chosen to allow the FLN delegates to sleep in neutral Switzerland and because it was out of the sight and beyond the range of the OAS or nosy journalists. The talks were fractious at first and, from the French point of view, it was almost impossible to see a way forward. The Algerians refused to make any concessions to the French team, and the senior French diplomat, Louise Joxe, reported despairingly to de Gaulle that even French surrender was not enough for these Algerian hardmen. They wanted to humiliate France in revenge for the shame of colonization. The French complained that this was the politics of anger rather than international diplomacy.

On the very last day of the talks at Les Rousses, two French warplanes made a mortar and machine-gun attack on an FLN base near Oujda, a Moroccan town near the Algerian border. This was not an official military operation but a wildcat strike by two civilians, one of whom was avenging his brother’s death at the hands of the FLN. The raid was a squalid affair – the base was not a military installation but a refugee camp. The casualties included a wounded man who was shot on the operating table along with the nurses who were tending him.

And then, suddenly, on 18 March 1962, there was a breakthrough: at the neighbouring spa town of Evian, the French and the Algerians agreed to a ceasefire. A referendum on Algerian independence was put to the French and Algerian electorates, who both voted overwhelmingly to set Algeria free. On 3 July, Algeria was made formally independent.

But the end of the war did not mean the end of the killing. The OAS maintained their policy of aggression, and the death toll in Algiers averaged between twenty and thirty murders per day. In response to the ceasefire, the OAS patrolled the city, ripping down the posters which showed smiling European and Muslim children beneath the rubric ‘Peace in Algeria. For our children.’ They declared the French army an enemy and a target, and banned all Muslims from entering European quarters on pain of death. The headquarters of the OAS was the working-class pied-noir district of Bab-el-Oued. This is where the OAS committed its greatest acts of sedition so far, which included, on 23 March, gunning down a truck-load of French conscripts, new to the army and Algeria, who found themselves surrounded by a baying crowd of pieds noirs as they tried to pass through the narrow streets of the area. OAS gunmen smilingly responded to the taunts of the mob, killing seven of the conscripts and leaving eleven more critically injured, left to die alone, trembling with fear and pain in the street.

In a fury, the French commander-in-chief, General Ailleret, launched an all-out assault on Bab-el-Oued, aiming to eradicate the OAS once and for all. The area was sealed off – the district contained some 60,000 inhabitants – and a tank and artillery battery strafed the old buildings and streets for the next three days. During this period, the ordinary inhabitants of the area were caught between the French army in the European city and the FLN in the Casbah.

On 24 March the pieds noirs again took to the streets to demonstrate against the shelling. They broke through the cordon around Bab-el-Oued and poured into the city, towards the Grande Poste and the rue d’Isly. Here they met a roadblock – held by one of the few French regiments which still had a majority of Algerian Muslims in its ranks. These troops were mainly young country lads, who had performed well in the field but now, for their first time in Algiers, were faced with an angry mob of several hundred thousand. The inevitable happened: a shot was fired from a balcony and the scene descended into bloody anarchy. The crowd stampeded: men and women were trampled underfoot. Meanwhile the nervous troops shot at random into the wall of angry faces, killing forty-six and injuring hundreds more. When the shooting stopped, the elegant streets of modern Algiers were littered with the wounded and the dead.

The final weeks of March 1962 saw the OAS at the height of its power and influence, but it would also turn out to be the beginning of its decline. The pied-noir population was angered by the double betrayal that Algerian Muslims and mainland France had inflicted upon them and they wanted vengeance if nothing else. Elegant bourgeois ladies were captured on newsreels around the world, interviewed by reporters to whom they barked, ‘This is to the death, monsieur.’7 But as youths in black leather jackets drove around the cities, now shooting in the daytime at will, Europeans were already beginning to leave Algeria. They knew that they were outnumbered nine to one and feared that, abandoned by the French in the wake of the ceasefire, they would be slaughtered. On street corners Muslims sold cheap suitcases – a provocative gesture which made real the threat in the FLN slogan, ‘The suitcase or the coffin!’ – and did a roaring trade. The OAS had no strategy to counter this tide, other than trying to provoke the FLN into revenge attacks.

In the event, the FLN militants held their nerve and their discipline. The situation became more volatile as the ranks of the FLN were swelled by so-called ‘marsiens’ – Muslims who had remained non-committal throughout the war but who in March (mars in French), when they saw the tide of history turning, threw their lot in with the Nationalists. They were motivated partly by an instinct for self-preservation and partly by the greedy anticipation of claiming property and land as the chaotic exodus of the Europeans began. Against FLN orders, many marsiens committed atrocities as a desperate way of declaring their new-found allegiance.

The FLN leaders struggled hard to control these new elements but this was all but impossible in the febrile days leading up to the declaration of independence. The final act of violence in the war occurred in Oran on 5 July. As the FLN moved in to take control from the French troops, a mob of Muslims tore through the centre of the town, waving Algerian flags and lashing out at all Europeans – men, women and children – with indiscriminate fury. Shots were fired at motorists. The promenade on boulevard du Front de Mer was soon littered with dead bodies. A woman who came out on to her balcony to see what was happening was shot dead. The fighting grew in intensity as the afternoon wore on – a European was hung from a meat hook outside the Rex Cinema. The Muslims slit throats, nearly tearing the heads off cadavers in the process. The panic-stricken French made for the offices of L’Echo d’Oran or the French garrison by the port. French troops watched all of this, unable to intervene under the terms of the Evian ceasefire.

The French government had guessed that some 100,000 pieds noirs would leave Algeria during the first year after the handover of power. By the first weeks of August 1962, over 350,000 had abandoned houses and businesses, making for the docks of Algiers or Oran and a boat to Europe. A million more would follow them, one of the greatest mass migrations in history.

In the streets of Bab-el-Oued, pieds noirs destroyed everything they could not bring with them. Only two suitcases were permitted per person. They left behind the paraphernalia of everyday life – family photos, ornaments and mementoes, furniture and crockery. All was smashed or burned so that ‘they’ – the Algerian Muslims – could not complete the act of dispossession. The scenes down by the port were pathetic and heartbreaking. Most of the pieds noirs were as poor as, or poorer than, the Muslims. Old people and children had known no other country, no other life, than Algeria. With meagre belongings and little money they were leaving for a country that, as they saw it, had betrayed them and now forced them into a permanent exile.