If British policy towards the Arab world had suffered from ambivalence, in France there was no such ambiguity: by July 1956, France was at war with the Arab world. Inland from the 2,000-mile coastline of the Mahgreb, the western sector of the old Mohammedan empire, the flames of violence flickered and smouldered.
France had entered North Africa in 1830, when Marshal Bugeaud descended on Algeria with 200,000 men. In 1881 Jules Ferry extended her hold by establishing a protectorate in Tunisia. Finally, in 1912, Marshal Lyautey began the conquest of Morocco. After them came hundreds of thousands of French settlers, who built roads and ports and railways, established industry, broke up the feudal Arab estates, and planted vines and olives. By 1945, there were more than 1,500,000 of them, stretched from Casablanca to Tunis, Frenchmen by blood and education, North Africans by birth. Beneath them—apart from a handful of wealthy caids, reviled by their compatriots as French puppets and popularly known as beni-oui-ouis—was a vast lumpenproletariat of 20 million Arabs.
But in 1945, in the wake of the liberating Allied armies, came the seeds of a new era. Roosevelt instructed his local representatives, such as Robert Murphy, to encourage Arab leaders to secure self-government. There was an immediate response. Before the year was out, the Algerians revolted at Sétif, massacring the local French community. The French exacted a fearful penalty: Senegalese troops were told by their commanders to shoot, on sight, all adult male Arabs for the next twenty-four hours. More than 45,000, including many women and children, were murdered.
For the next ten years, throughout the Mahgreb, the sickening pattern was repeated again and again: Arab demands for self-government, blind French refusal, violent revolt, brutal repression. Moderate Arab leaders—those who advocated a dual, Franco-Arab community—saw their political power undermined by French intransigence, and their followers desert to the advocates of violence. The extremist parties—the Istiqlal in Morocco, the Messalistes in Algeria, the Néo-Destour in Tunisia—gradually became dominant in the nationalist movements.
Successive French governments passed measures of constitutional reform; in each case they were sabotaged by the local French colons and their associates in the North African civil service, army and police. The Statute of Algeria, passed by an overwhelming vote of the Assembly in 1946, was never fully applied; and the elections for which it provided were faked by the local authorities—only beni-oui-ouis were returned. Tunisia was given a measure of self-government, including a cabinet, appointed by the Resident-General from among Arabs regarded as ‘reliable’; but when even these proved unco-operative, in 1952, the Resident promptly dissolved the Government, without reference to Paris; the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, was subsequently forced to endorse the act by pressure from the colon lobby in the Assembly. The next August, in Morocco, a conspiracy of colons dethroned the legitimate Sultan, Mohammed V, and replaced him with a French puppet called Ben Arafa; again the Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, was obliged to endorse the fait accompli. By the end of 1953, the upland areas of both Tunisia and Morocco were in a state of permanent revolt, while the big cities were dominated by rival gangs of gunmen: Arab terrorists on the one hand and French counter-terrorists on the other, working in league with the local police, and murdering not merely Arab nationalists, but responsible and moderate Frenchmen who advocated a peaceful settlement.
In August 1954, the French Left made a last, desperate and, in part, successful attempt to break out of the pattern of violence. Mendès-France, exploiting the vast popularity he had won in France by his successful solution to the Indo-China war, flew to Tunis and opened negotiations for a wide measure of self-government. The attempt appeared to have succeeded; negotiations towards a semi-independent status for Tunisia were carried on throughout the autumn; the Tunisian rebels were amnestied and ceased fighting; something approaching calm descended on the Mahgreb. Then, on the night of All Saints’ Day, November 1 1954, the ‘activist’ wing of the Algerian Messalistes broke away from the leadership and launched a violent revolt in the Aurès Mountains in south-east Algeria. They appeared to be well armed and organised. Preliminary attempts by the French Army to suppress the revolt were unsuccessful. Fighting settled down for the winter, and the revolt began to spread to other areas in Algeria. Mendès-France’s majority in the Assembly declined abruptly, and at the beginning of February his Government collapsed.
He was succeeded by Edgar Faure, a wily professional politician whose own views were progressive, but who was dependent for support on a Right-Centre majority. Despite the pressure of the colon lobby, he managed to complete the negotiations for the new constitution of Tunisia; but in Algeria he was forced back on to a policy of blind repression. More and more French troops were moved into Algeria. Then, as spring turned into summer, the situation in Morocco deteriorated sharply. The almost universal hatred with which the Moroccans regarded the French puppet sultan, Ben Arafa, had been compensated, in part, by his alliance with El Glaoui, the last of the great feudal Berber chieftains, who controlled most of the southern Atlas. But El Glaoui’s power was now beginning to collapse: the revolt against French rule was spreading even to his own tribesmen.
On August 20, the second anniversary of the deposition of the legitimate sultan, the tribesmen rose in revolt, not only on the Moroccan side of the Atlas but to the east, in the mountains of western Algeria. Over 2,000 French colons were massacred. The next day, the French Army and Air Force moved in. Whole tribes and villages were destroyed. The total number of Arabs killed—men, women and children—will never be ascertained, but it is believed to be in the region of 60,000. Those who escaped joined the rebels in western Algeria, or a new organisation, set up in the Atlas, called the Moroccan Liberation Army. Morocco itself was now ungovernable, and in October El Glaoui abruptly changed sides and renewed his allegiance to Mohammed V. This was decisive, and immediately afterwards the French Government removed Ben Arafa to Tangier and restored the legitimate sultan. Before he returned to Rabat, the capital, he demanded and obtained a preliminary agreement which granted Morocco semi-independent status. It went much further than the Tunisian treaty, and Habib Bourguiba, the Tunisian Prime Minister, promptly requested equivalent concessions for Tunisia. It was rapidly becoming clear that both Tunisia and Morocco were lost to French rule.
But what of Algeria? The fighting had grown fiercer throughout the summer and autumn; goaded by repression, more and more young Algerians were joining the rebel bands; they supplied themselves with captured French arms and a trickle of munitions from Egypt, which were smuggled across the Libyan frontier; gradually the insurrectionary areas spread and linked up. But until the end of 1955 there was still a chance for a negotiated settlement. Moderate Arab leaders refused to join the rebels and condemned their excesses; a substantial section even of the colons believed that a new statute could be devised which would give the Algerians a real share in the government of the country and yet protect the interests of the French minority. Messages sent out from rebel-occupied areas indicated that they, too, were prepared to compromise.
This was also the mood of metropolitan France. In December, harassed from all sides, the Faure Government collapsed and promptly dissolved Parliament. In the subsequent election campaign, fought over Christmas, Mendès-France’s Radicals linked forces with the French Socialists in a coalition called the Republican Front, and fought the election almost exclusively on a programme of negotiated settlement in Algeria. The French electorate responded. The Socialists, Radicals and Communists—who also favoured negotiation—each gained substantially in votes. The members of the Faure coalition lost heavily. When Parliament reassembled at the end of January, the Republican Front found itself in command of a working majority, pledged to negotiate peace in Algeria.
Then the first difficulty arose. Who was to be Prime Minister? Mendès-France was the natural choice. He enjoyed immense personal popularity among progressive Frenchmen of all parties. He was identified with the policy of reform in North Africa. And he was a man of unshakable determination, against whom the pressures of colons and generals would prove useless. Unfortunately, the party he led, by virtue of numbers, was the junior partner in the coalition. Guy Mollet, General Secretary of the French Socialist Party, had the first option on the premiership. Despite the entreaties of his own colleagues, he refused to decline it.
It was Mollet’s first senior governmental appointment. Since 1946, he had controlled the machinery of the Socialist Party, basing his power on two big federations in the north of France, which, together, enabled him to command a majority at party conferences. He was an expert manipulator of the block vote, a superb intriguer in the couloirs of the Assembly, a back-stairs politician, with a long and distinguished record for overthrowing France’s transient governments. But he had never held supreme power himself; and he was a vain and timid man. The Government he formed consisted mainly of his own nominees in the Socialist Party, and two or three Right-wing Radicals, themselves political opponents of Mendès-France. Mendès-France was made a Cabinet minister without portfolio; the only other member of the Government with a progressive record on North Africa was Alain Savary, Minister for Tunisian and Moroccan Affairs.
Mollet’s first move—in accordance with the electoral programme of the Republican Front—was to fly to Algiers and begin negotiations for a peace settlement. Before leaving Paris, he had appointed General Catroux, a well-known progressive, Governor-General in Algeria. But the day after Mollet arrived, whilst he was laying a wreath on the war memorial in Algiers, his party was attacked by a mob of 20,000 hysterical colons. For Mollet, it was the moment of truth; his first contact with the realities of government. His face and clothes spattered with rotten eggs and tomatoes, he was carried, trembling and almost unconscious, into the offices of the Government-General. His first act was to telephone Paris and cancel Catroux’s appointment; instead, he designated Robert Lacoste, a Cabinet minister known to favour the colons. His next act was to return to Paris. The electoral promises were forgotten. The negotiations were abandoned. And the only alternative was to carry on the war.
For a few weeks, Mendès-France remained in the Cabinet, trying desperately to brake the drift to catastrophe. Then, abruptly, he resigned in disgust. Henceforth, a group of four men controlled the Government. There was Mollet himself, rejoicing in a new-found popularity among the Right and Centre of the Assembly. There was one of his placemen, Christian Pineau, the Foreign Minister, a Right-wing Socialist who Wrote children’s fairy stories in his spare time and who indulged in Napoleonic day-dreams. There was the Defence Minister, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, a Right-wing Radical who was the Government’s contact man with the colon lobby in the Assembly. And finally there was Lacoste, who was given a rapturous welcome when he arrived in Algiers, and who promptly pledged himself to a military suppression of the revolt.
But how? By the beginning of March, France had 250,000 troops in North Africa. A preliminary assessment by the general staff in Algiers concluded that the revolt could be contained, and eventually stamped out, if the available forces could be increased to 400,000. Similar assessments had been produced, at intervals, throughout the long and disastrous course of the Indo-China war. But Lacoste had never fought in Indo-China. He forwarded the report to Paris with his enthusiastic approval. The Cabinet adopted it. Legislation was drawn up, and passed, for the recall of 150,000 reservists and for the assignment of additional military credits from the budget reserve. Throughout the spring, more and more men were shipped to Algeria. There was widespread opposition. Whole regiments of reservists mutinied. Troop-trains were derailed. An entire shipload of reservists broke loose in Marseilles and hid themselves in the Old Port. There were violent incidents at Paris and Le Havre. Nevertheless, the military build-up continued.
Lacoste had promised the Cabinet a ‘dramatic improvement’ in the military situation by the beginning of May. May came and went. Military headquarters in Algiers stepped up their claims of ‘terrorists’ killed and captured; but the area in the hands of the rebels continued to spread. In April, the revolt reached the hills overlooking Algiers and spread even into the suburbs of the capital. By May it had swept over the whole of western Algeria and was operating in conjunction with units of the Moroccan Liberation Army in the Atlas. The railway from Constantine to the Algerian south was cut and had to be abandoned. Larger and larger French units were ambushed by well-armed rebel bands. Locally recruited Algerian and Moroccan troops—and even Senegalese, sent up from France’s central African colonies—proved increasingly unreliable; whole companies killed their white officers and deserted to the rebels. In May, Lacoste was forced to order the withdrawal of all non-French regiments from the fighting. In June, the rebels, now provided with an effective headquarters and a superb system of intelligence, switched their activities to isolated colon farms in the rural areas. The colons began to withdraw into the big towns, and there swell the chorus of criticism.
What was going wrong? Why had 400,000 men, with every advantage of modern equipment, failed to crush a rebellion which consisted of—as the French repeatedly claimed—‘a handful of desperate murderers’? The facts were painfully simple. The prime nourisher of the revolt was French policy itself. Brutal repression was gradually driving the entire Algerian people on to the side of the rebels, and many of them into their ranks. The conduct of the French, throughout the rebellion, can only be compared to the barbarism of the Russians in Hungary. Villages known, or suspected, to be supplying the rebels with food were obliterated by jet fighter-bombers (supplied, incidentally, by American off-shore funds for NATO defence against Russia); flame-throwers and gas bombs were used against mountain hide-outs. Torture was employed against prisoners; both gonflage à l’eau, the forcible injection of water by a reverse stomach-pump, and the notorious ceinture éléctrique, an electrical-shock device perfected by the Gestapo. By May, some 40,000 Arabs were interned in vast, filthy concentration camps outside Algiers. Liberal Frenchmen were expelled or arrested. Arab lawyers, doctors, teachers, who had played no part in the rebellion were given long terms of imprisonment, schools were shut down, newspapers suppressed, hospitals were handed over to the military. With each excess, each act of violence, more Arabs drifted into the hills, or joined the murder gangs in the towns. The Algerian Liberation Army, which had numbered a mere 3,000 at the outset of the revolt, had swollen, by May 1956, to nearly 100,000.
And it was becoming well armed, too. News of French arms convoys invariably reached rebel headquarters; they were often successfully ambushed and their contents captured. The native regiments, before their withdrawal, handed over their weapons freely—even artillery trains. French reservists, dragged from their homes to fight a colons’ war, sold their arms in the big towns. An immense black market in deadly weapons sprang up in the native quarter of Algiers; by June, a sub-machine gun could be bought for £25, a rifle for £10; all were French army issue. Nor did the rebels lack for money. The beni-oui-ouis, enriched by grants of land and money from the French Government, were blackmailed by the rebels; they contributed freely to save their lives from sudden assassination. The money thus obtained bought more arms. As in Indo-China, the French were not merely arming both sides; they were financing them too.
But none of this could be told to the French public. A scapegoat was required, an alibi for failure. The only answer was: Cairo. During the first half of 1956 all the Algerian leaders who had managed to escape death or imprisonment had fled there, where they formed the Committee for National Liberation. They were undoubtedly helped by the Egyptian Government with money and, to a certain extent, with arms. Some of these—a trickle—reached the rebels. On this flimsy basis the French Government constructed a vast campaign of hatred against Egypt, personalised in the figure of Colonel Nasser. The French Press and radio fell into line. But for Egyptian aid, it was said, the rebellion would collapse. Stories were circulated of vast quantities of Russian arms, transported into Algeria across the desert, or shipped into lonely creeks on the Algerian coast; Egyptian and Iraqi officers were said to be directing rebel operations; Egypt’s role in Algeria was identical to that of Communist China in the Indo-China war.
To what extent did the Government believe its own propaganda? It is difficult to say. Certainly they accepted the view of the military commanders, who advanced Egypt as an excuse for their own failures. Pineau, the most gullible of the four principal ministers, undoubtedly placed responsibility on Egypt. Early in the summer, he paid a visit and extracted—so he told the Assembly—a promise from Colonel Nasser that he would cease aiding the Algerians forthwith. What exactly occurred during this conversation will probably never be known. It is highly unlikely that Nasser made any such promise; but Pineau, in his muddled way, believed that he had; and when, as the weeks went by and brought no improvement in the military situation in Algeria, Pineau concluded that Nasser had broken his solemn word of honour. Nasser had also made him look ridiculous in the eyes of the Assembly. By June, Pineau shared with Selwyn Lloyd a growing animosity towards the Egyptian dictator. About this time, he ordered the Quai d’Orsay to open up private negotiations with the Israeli Government. Hitherto, France, like Britain, had supplied arms to both sides in the Arab-Israeli dispute; but from now on supplies to Egypt were cut off, and those to Israel substantially increased.
The other three ministers did not completely share Pineau’s illusions. But they agreed with him in seeing Egypt as the key to a solution in Algeria. Mollet was in favour of opening negotiations with the rebels as soon as the military reinforcements had brought an improvement in the situation. Lacoste—backed by Bourgès-Maunoury—rejected this argument as unrealistic. There might be, he said, some improvement by the end of the year—but not before. In the meantime, it was essential to shake the confidence of the Algerians in their ability to eject the French by force of arms. And this could only be done by striking at Egypt. Nasser had made himself the champion of the Arab world; in recent months he had gone from success to success. If his bubble could be pricked, if the reality of his power could be exposed—and by France—then the psychological effect on the Algerians would be decisive. At the moment, France could only negotiate from weakness; but if Nasser were destroyed or tamed, she could negotiate from strength.
Through May, June and July, the debate continued in the French Cabinet. Gradually, Lacoste’s argument carried the day. Gradually, French ministers came to regard the real enemy as Nasser and not the Algerian rebels. Only the opportunity for a showdown was lacking. And a showdown was becoming more urgent. The Mollet Government, elected to make peace in Algeria, had chosen instead to carry on the war on an ever-increasing scale. But despite the flood of men and material flowing into North Africa, despite the daily communiqués of rebel groups ‘annihilated’, the French public was becoming increasingly aware that the war was being lost. The bills, too, were coming in. At the beginning of July, Paul Ramadier, the Minister of Finance, made a report to the Cabinet which revealed that France—after four years of financial stability—was poised on the verge of a fresh wave of inflation. If the retail price index rose by a further 0.2 per cent, all French industrial workers would become automatically entitled, under the sliding-scale wage-price agreement, to wage increases of 5 per cent. Moreover, he added, if the war continued on its present scale beyond October, it would be necessary to revise the budget estimates and introduce massive increases in taxation.
Two weeks later, Nasser seized the Canal. The opportunity had arrived. Here was the gratuitous insult, the long-awaited signal for the campaign of retribution. The next day, an excited Pineau was on the telephone to 10 Downing Street.