CHAPTER 20

The Last Battle

The bonds of blood and emotion that bound France and Algeria brought wealth and status to the pieds noirs, benefits that were the result — as Charles de Gaulle would record in his memoirs — of French money, French technology, and local labour. But they also came, he had to concede, at the price of terrible “agonies and indignities” inflicted on a rebellious native population.[1]

When de Gaulle flew on June 4, 1958, to Algiers, travelling in a French-made Caravelle jetliner, he was making his first voyage as prime minister after being out of office for a dozen years.[2] He had no “strictly predetermined plan” to deal with what was rapidly evolving into a “French tragedy,” other than the conviction that no policy short of “replacing domination by association … would be worthy of France.”[3] De Gaulle’s emotional attachment to Algeria stemmed not only from all he had absorbed as a youth who had feasted on the romance of empire and the grandeur of France’s attainments. Fresh in his memory, too, was the fact that it was in Algiers that he had won the undisputed leadership of Free France and that it was there he had established the Provisional Government that he later transferred to Paris. De Gaulle recognized that the French in Algeria, long secure in their privileged status and wealth, were now haunted by the fear of being “submerged, dispersed, and driven out” of their idyllic Algérie française.[4] He was in it “up to the eyes,” but he was firm in his mind that France had no choice but to grant its wealthiest colony the right to self-determination.[5]

De Gaulle’s plane had been escorted by French air force fighters flying in a Cross of Lorraine pattern. On his arrival at Maison-Blanche airport outside Algiers he was met by a clutch of officials led by General Raoul Salan and General Jacques Massu, key figures in the Committee of Public Safety that had been formed as part of their intrigue to bring de Gaulle to power. Their chief sympathizer, Jacques Soustelle, who would soon become de Gaulle’s minister of information, was also there.

De Gaulle was wearing a plain uniform without medals and on the drive from the airport to the harbour, he stood in an open Citroën to receive the cheers of pieds noirs and Arabs alike. Le Monde described the reception as a “spectacle [that] resembled both an American-style triumph and the Tour de France.”[6] A reception on the cruiser De Grasse followed, and then it was on to a mass meeting at the Place du Forum with thousands of Algerians cheering their new chief.

De Gaulle entered the government offices at the Palais d’Été around seven o’clock, and his party made its way to the big balcony overlooking the square below. When de Gaulle stepped forward he paused, raised his arms in the V gesture that was by now a familiar sight, and only then began to speak. His first words — “je vous ai …” — were drowned out by the welcome of the crowd, but the third word that he uttered — “compris!” fell like a lighted match on dry tinder, setting the square afire. He had told the pieds noirs that he understood them — and they took it to mean he was with them in their determination to hold on to Algeria.[7]

Had the crowd listened more carefully to what else de Gaulle said, their excitement might have been muted: “… in less than three months’ time, all the French, including the ten million French citizens of Algeria, will have an opportunity to decide their own destiny.” But more incendiary words were to follow. Two days later, at the prosperous farming town of Mostaganem, de Gaulle finished his remarks with the phrase that had become sacred to the pieds noirs cause: “Vive l’Algérie française!”

Alastair Horne has written: “The crowd went wild. Men as well as women wept; Muslims gesticulated with V signs.”[8] We have no way of knowing whether de Gaulle had become caught up in the emotion of the moment, or was simply exasperated by relentless cries of “Soustelle! Soustelle!” that preceded his talk. The official draft of his text contains no such words. But it was all that Soustelle, Salan, and Massu needed to convince themselves de Gaulle would support a massive repression of the rebel Front de Libération Nationale. In fact, they were half right: while de Gaulle was convinced Algeria must eventually be given the option of independence, he insisted its freedom was a privilege that could only be granted by a benevolent victor; it could not be a concession extracted from a defeated ruler. By example, de Gaulle the very next week signed agreements that withdrew French forces from Morocco and Tunisia, affirming the independence of those former colonies.

The advent of de Gaulle and his talk of “true equality” for all in Algeria demoralized some sections of the FLN, but brought no halt to attacks by its military wing, the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN). Based largely in Tunisia, the ALN suffered heavy losses when it attempted to crack the Morice Line of fences and minefields that the French had set up to resist its incursions. On de Gaulle’s last day in Algeria, the FLN attacked the police station in the city of Bone.

The rebels then turned to political action and, in September, from a safe haven in Cairo, the FLN announced the formation of a provisional government. Ferhat Abbas, for long considered by the French a moderate among Arab leaders, took up the presidency. In doing so, he was forgiving the FLN for having killed his nephew during its attack on Philippeville three years earlier. He also was demonstrating that Arabs could overcome their differences to present a united front to the French. Arab nations throughout the Middle East hastened to recognize the Abbas regime. In turn, they carried to the United Nations a call for the independence of Algeria. The next step for the FLN was to extend the war to France, with the intention of spreading fear among the civilian population that would lead to demands for withdrawal of the French army. During August and September, the FLN carried out more than four hundred bombing attacks in French cities, mostly aimed at military targets. In Paris, Jacques Soustelle miraculously escaped injury when gunmen raked his car as it drove down the avenue Friedland. On the same night, on the rue de Rivoli, rebel gunmen fired at police cars. Then, as suddenly as they started, the attacks in France were called off.

On September 4, de Gaulle presented his constitution for the Fifth Republic in a ceremony at the Place de la Republique. In a referendum on September 29, it won the approval of 78 percent of the voters, an endorsement that was helped along by news broadcasts on the state radio and TV networks that were heavily slanted in favour of the Yes side. De Gaulle went on the air (a privilege denied the Opposition) to say he was entrusting “the fate of France” to its citizens.

A week later, de Gaulle travelled again to Algeria to present a five-year plan for development of the country. When the FLN announced formation of its provisional government, de Gaulle responded with a press conference at the Hôtel Matignon. With three hundred journalists in attendance, he offered a “peace of the brave” to the Algerian rebels. All they had to do was ask for a meeting to discuss the end of hostilities. Rooms were booked at the Hôtel de Crillon for Ferhat Abbas and his Alsatian wife, but no one ever came. The FLN simply rejected de Gaulle’s overture.

If a settlement was to be reached in Algeria, de Gaulle decided, it would take the intervention of a new military chief. He brought General Salan back to France to become military governor of Paris and sent to Algiers the pipe-smoking General Maurice Challe, a veteran of the French air force. Challe had worked with the Resistance and in 1944 he had obtained the Luftwaffe order of battle in advance of D-Day and transmitted it to the British. In 1956, he had been instrumental in gaining the backing of British prime minister Anthony Eden for the French-Israeli attack on Egypt. By now a strong supporter of de Gaulle, Challe went to Algeria with a basic win-the-war strategy: carry the fight to the enemy. The Challe Plan, as it came to be known, brought thousands of Algerians into the native militia, enrolling 250,000 harkis as support to the French army. Using attack helicopters, the army devastated rebel encampments in operations that claimed thousands of Algerian lives. The French then herded a million Muslim civilians into “regroupment” camps. Torture was widely used in questioning prisoners.[9]

The FLN also unleashed terror attacks; in one village, Melouza, more than one hundred pieds noirs were massacred, their throats cut in an atrocity that came to be known as égorgement.

Approval of the constitution of the Fifth Republic paved the way for de Gaulle’s election as president, which came on December 21, when the electoral college — an elite body of eighty thousand leading citizens — chose him over several rivals, including a Communist senator and a centre-left candidate. As in the referendum, de Gaulle won 78 percent of the votes. On January 8, 1959, de Gaulle went to the Élysée Palace to be sworn in as president of the Fifth Republic. “The first of Frenchmen,” outgoing president René Coty told him, “is now the first man in France.” They rode up the Champs-Élysée together, paid tribute to the Unknown Soldier in a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe, and joined in singing “La Marseillaise.”[10] De Gaulle described his feelings in his memoirs:

On my return, henceforth the prisoner of my high duty, I heard all the doors of the palace closing behind ne. But at the same time I saw the prospect of a great undertaking open up before me … it must be done! If France in the depths of her being once more called upon me to serve as her guide, it was surely not, I felt, in order to preside over her sleep. After the terrible decline which she had suffered for more than a hundred years she must use the respite which chance had accorded her to re-establish her power, her wealth, and her influence in tune with the spirit of modern times. Failing this, a catastrophe on the scale of the century might one day crush her forever.… My duty was thus laid down, for as long as the people would follow me.[11]

President de Gaulle returned many times to Algeria, but nine months passed before he was ready to show his hand. He spoke on television and radio to declare that the time had come for Algeria’s “self-determination.” Algerians would be given the opportunity to choose between complete secession — which would mean loss of French benefits and economic support — and either full “Francization” (integration into France), or association with France in a federal regime. His offer was widely applauded in Metropolitan France. Le Monde declared that “de Gaulle has given France back her old prestige as the great Liberal nation.”[12] The National Assembly voted 441 to 23 to support de Gaulle’s policy. From Cairo came word that the provisional government was ready to consider preliminary talks.

In Algeria, de Gaulle’s scheme drew a bitter response from French settlers and the ultras — the advocates of Algérie française. The chief organ of the pieds noirs, the Echo d’Alger, expressed its hostility in sharply critical editorials. A militant body calling itself the Front National Français (FNF) turned out 1,500 uniformed men to escort Georges Bidault, the Resistance leader who now was campaigning against Algerian self-determination.

The FNF was the brainchild of Joseph Ortiz, a rabble-rousing saloonkeeper of decidedly fascist views. Ortiz ran a brasserie, the Bar du Forum, where he catered to an eclectic crowd of the Algiers French. Ortiz had been born in Algeria of Spanish stock and was a veteran of the Free French expeditionary force that had helped liberate Italy. He was known as “the king of tomatoes” after having supplied the tomatoes used to pelt French premier Guy Mollet on his 1956 visit. Many saw him as little more than a thug, but he described himself as simply a follower of the right-wing philosopher, Charles Maurras. He adopted as the symbol of the FNF a Celtic cross that had long been used by extreme right-wing groups. “The determination of the French will conquer the self-determination of de Gaulle,” Ortiz declared when he welcomed Bidault to the Forum. “Algiers may become Budapest, but we shall remain.… For us, it’s either the suitcase or the coffin!”[13] De Gaulle, he was suggesting, had left them no choice but to abandon Algeria or be killed by the rebels.

As the killings went on day after day, resentment toward Paris mounted. Not only had the army, despite some successes, failed to quell the rebellion, but now de Gaulle was ready to hand over Algeria to the Arabs. It was a difficult time for the new president on both political and personal matters. Just before Christmas, de Gaulle’s brother, Pierre, collapsed while visiting the Élysée, apparently from strain brought on by difficulties he was having in organizing France’s participation in Expo ’67, the World’s Fair to be held in Montreal. The president rushed to his side and tried to comfort him. Pierre recovered consciousness and was taken to a hospital, but he died in hospital on December 26. De Gaulle took a break from his duties with a short vacation in the Var department in the south of France.

De Gaulle was back in Paris when he heard that General Massu, head of the 10th Paratroop Dvision that had been carrying the brunt of the fighting against the FLN, had given an incendiary interview to a West German newspaper, Munich’s Suddeutsche Zeitung. “We no longer understand the policy of President de Gaulle,” he told the newspaper’s reporter, who had been a paratrooper like himself. “The government should help us to see the future clearly, in order that we can succeed in maintaining Algérie française.”[14] Massu was challenging de Gaulle directly, but, by now, too many hands had been played. Too volatile a figure to be allowed to remain in Algeria, he was ordered back to Paris before being reassigned as the military governor of Metz, the city where de Gaulle had served in the 1930s.

Massu’s departure infuriated the colons. Within hours of learning of his banishment, Joseph Ortiz and his pieds noir rival, Pierre Lagaillarde, hatched plans for a general strike and uprising. Lagaillarde, a lawyer and ex-paratrooper, had led student demonstrations that helped bring de Gaulle to power and was now a member of the National Assembly. While Ortiz was announcing plans for the strike, Lagaillarde had already seized a university building that he promised to hold until de Gaulle had yielded. Protecting him were 1,500 men of the FNF carrying weapons “liberated” from an army depot. On January 24, 1960, General Challe threw up roadblocks across the city while pied noir insurgents huddled behind their barricades. Thirty thousand protesters filled the Place de la Forum, chanting anti-de Gaulle slogans and vowing never to abandon Algeria.

The counterattack, when it came, was deadly. Police splayed the square with tear gas and a gun battle broke out. While the police engaged the strikers, the paratroopers mysteriously held back. As the echo of gunshots faded, sympathetic paratroopers and rebels were seen talking together at the barricades while women handed out croissants with coffee and wine. By the time the casualties had been totalled up, the count was twenty dead on both sides, and more than two hundred wounded.

Joseph Ortiz thought he had won: “Tomorrow, in Paris I shall be the ruling power,” he announced.

Paris had other ideas. De Gaulle had been at Colombey when the troubles began. He rushed back to Paris, arriving at midnight, and met with his Cabinet and army commanders. The next day, a new detachment of troops was ordered to Algiers to take over from the reluctant paratroopers. De Gaulle also dispatched his premier, Michel Debre, to Algiers with orders to end the insurrection. Everything Debre heard pointed to an imminent takeover by a junta of colonels and a pied noir rabble. The civilian governor, Paul Delouvrier, convinced General Challe that the two of them should leave the city and take refuge at an air force base twenty miles to the east. Delouvrier made an emotional radio broadcast in which he said he was leaving behind as hostages his wife and a newborn son. In Paris, there were rumours of a shadow government in the making. Work began on plans to move the government to Belgium in event of a military takeover of the capital.

President de Gaulle had been scheduled to broadcast to the nation on January 29. He was urged to move up the date but refused to do so. When de Gaulle appeared before television cameras dressed in his uniform, he appeared pale and under great strain. He told the nation he was wearing military garb in order to show it was “General de Gaulle who speaks, as well as the Head of State.” He made it clear that “the Algerians will have the right to decide their own destiny” and that “self-determination … is the only possible outcome.” He warned the army that it was he who bore “the supreme authority” and that he was giving the order for the rule of law to be maintained. Then, asserting all the emotional power of which he was capable, de Gaulle addressed himself to the people:

Lastly, I address France. Well, my dear old country, here we are together once again, facing a grave trial. By virtue of the mandate that the people have given me and of the national legitimacy that I have embodied for twenty years, I ask you all to give me your support. While the guilty men, who dream of being usurpers, use as a pretext the decision that I have taken with regard to Algeria, let it be known everywhere that I shall not go back on it. To cede on this point … would also be to abase the state.… France would be no more than a poor, dislocated toy floating on the oceans of adventures.[15]

Few in France could resist such a powerful appeal to both sentiment and reality. Within minutes of de Gaulle’s address, telegrams of support were flowing into the Élysée. In Algeria, where the broadcast was heard during a pounding downpour, one army unit after another declared its loyalty. By Monday morning, February 1, the streets were bare of paving stones and while littered with debris, were otherwise empty. Joseph Ortiz disappeared, apparently having taken refuge in Spain. Pierre Lagaillarde, after threatening to blow up the building he held, marched out with a band of followers, flags flying, and was immediately arrested. He was flown to Santé Prison in Paris. Allowed out on bail during his trial for sedition, he also fled to Spain. De Gaulle shook up his Cabinet, dropping Jacques Soustelle, who had continued to support the Algerian protest. He also, relieved General Challe of his post. The battle of “Barricades Week” had been won, but the last battle, to win peace in Algeria, still eluded de Gaulle.

Suddenly, in the spring of 1960, new hope for a settlement of the Algerian revolution appeared in the form of an overture from a field commander of the FLN, Colonel Si Salah. Word conveyed to Paris via mysterious intermediaries suggested that de Gaulle’s offer of a “peace of the brave” was not dead after all. If France would promise an amnesty, the revolutionaries would turn in their arms. De Gaulle, ready to gamble on the possibility of a breakthrough, agreed to meet Si Salah and two aides at the Élysée Palace. They met, and de Gaulle revealed he was about to issue a new appeal to the FLN for peace talks. The idea of an amnesty was put aside for the moment. The interview over, de Gaulle declared: “Because we are fighting each other, I will not shake your hand, but I salute you.”[16] Si Salah’s reward for his efforts was his arrest by the FLN; he later died in an ambush by a French patrol while being transferred to Tunisia.

De Gaulle’s offer to talk peace with the Algerian rebels included the firm commitment that “we await them here in order to find with them an honourable end to the fighting.” This time, the rebels answered with the assurance that they, too, wanted to “put an end to the conflict.” They were ready to send a delegation headed by Ferhat Abbas, their provisional president, to meet de Gaulle. Despite this promising overture, when delegates of the two sides met in the Paris suburb of Melun to negotiate a summit meeting, their talks collapsed in mutual suspicion. The promised referendum on allowing Algeria self-determination went ahead on January 8, 1961, and it produced satisfactory results, although the yes vote was far from overwhelming. Across France, 75 percent voted approval, but in Algeria, where the FLN told people to abstain, only 55 percent voted for self-determination. Two weeks later, the Algerian provisional government declared its willingness to “engage in negotiations with the French government.”

With peace an imminent prospect, the stubborn supporters of Algérie française saw that any hope of staving off defeat would require a change in government in Paris. No price, including the assassination of de Gaulle, would be too high to pay. The first steps were taken by two colonels, Antoine Argoud and Joseph Broizat, who found a sympathetic response among higher-ranking officers. They formed themselves into the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS). The conspiracy was joined by General Challe, who had resigned following his dismissal from Algiers, and was now ready to mount an armed coup. With him came General Salan, the former inspector general of the army, Edmond Jouhaud, the air force commander, and others who had been critical of de Gaulle’s policies.

The “generals’ putsch” was touched off on April 22, a Saturday. It began with the arrest of the top officials of the French government in Algiers, including General Fernand Gambiez, the army commander-in-chief; Jean Morin, the delegate-general and civilian governor; and René Jannin, the prefect of police. Among those taken prisoner was a Cabinet minister visiting Algiers, Robert Buron. By dawn the conspirators, joined by several paratroop regiments, were in control of the chief government buildings in Algiers.

De Gaulle was awakened at 2:30 a.m. and told of the situation. He ordered his minister for Algeria, Louis Joxe, to fly immediately to Algiers, along with General Jean Olié, chief of the General Staff. They took off as General Challe was broadcasting a proclamation of the uprising. “A government of abandonment is preparing to hand over Algeria to the rebellion … the army shall not fail in its mission.” Despite Challe’s call, most army units remained loyal, as did the navy and the air force. No effort was made to move on Paris.

“Fidel Castro would already have been here,” de Gaulle remarked. “But that poor Challe isn’t Fidel Castro.”[17] De Gaulle took to the air on Sunday night to declare that “an insurrectional power has been set up in Algeria by a military junta.” He went on:

Their enterprise is leading straight to national disaster. The State is flouted, the nation defied, our power shaken, our international prestige abased, our place and our role in Africa compromised. And by whom? Alas! Alas! By men whose duty, honour, raison d’être is to serve and to obey. In the name of France, I order that every means, I say every means, be used to close the road to those men, until they are crushed. I forbid any Frenchman and, above all, any soldier to carry out any of their orders. The only leaders, civil and military, who have the right to assume responsibilities are those who have been properly appointed to do so. French men and women, help me.[18]

Once again the de Gaulle words had worked their magic. Biographer Jean Lacouture considers this speech the greatest of de Gaulle’s career: “Already undermined by their divisions and by their lack of vision,” he has written, “the Algiers rebels were to be swept aside by these words.”[19]

By the next morning, General Challe knew his cause had failed. He surrendered, as did General Zeller. Others escaped and living underground, then joined with the OAS to plot further against de Gaulle. Challe was tried and sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. Undeterred, OAS plotters began a vicious wave of attacks that would go on for years. On May 19, the OAS bombed nineteen buildings in Algiers and on May 31 Police Commissioner Roger Gavoury was stabbed to death. An escalating series of bombings later spread to France.

The long-delayed peace talks with the Algerian provisional government finally got underway in Evian, on the French side of Lake Geneva, on May 20. The OAS assassinated the mayor of the town and stepped up its attacks in Algeria. In September in Paris, an attempt was made to bomb de Gaulle’s car as he was driven with his wife to Colombey. Ten kilograms of plastic concealed in a pile of sand exploded, sending a sheet of flame across the road, but no one was injured. In October, thirty thousand Muslims staged a demonstration in Paris in support of the FLN. It was not the kind of showing likely to be tolerated by the Paris police chief, Maurice Papon. His officers beat back the demonstrators, killing at least thirty and perhaps as many as three hundred.

The endgame of the peace talks was finally played out ten months after their beginning, with the announcement on March 18, 1962, that an accord had been reached. The ninety-three-page document covered everything from the cessation of hostilities to the treatment of civilians. French voters gave the accord 90 percent backing, and on July 1, voters in Algeria added their support — by more than 99 percent. Two days later, France recognized an independent Algeria. Ahmed Ben Bella, the young soldier on whose chest Charles de Gaulle had pinned a Médaille Militaire in 1945, would become its first president.

Within a few months of Algerian independence, nine hundred thousand of the slightly more than one million pieds noirs had packed their suitcases and abandoned their homes and businesses. One in three of the quarter of a million Algerian Muslims serving in the French army — regulars and harkis alike — also took refuge in France. The return of such large numbers brought both economic dislocation and heavy social cost to France. The FLN estimated in 1964 that the war had taken 1.5 million Algerian lives. The French army lost more than twenty-five thousand men, and after the war, large numbers of pro-French Muslims were murdered by vengeful revolutionaries. In addition, France was left with a dirty residue of the war in the form of the OAS, which continued to carry out attacks and to attempt assassinations in France. The most notorious OAS leader, General Salan, was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. After his arrest in Algiers in April 1962, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He and others involved in the coup were given amnesty in 1968.

Some understanding of the immense psychic trauma that the war caused in France can be gained by comparing what the United States might have suffered had its defeat in Vietnam occurred under similar circumstances. Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow offer such a perspective in their book, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong:Why We Love France but not the French:

Imagine, if at the time of the Vietnam War, there had been one million [American] settlers who had lived in Vietnam for four generations. Imagine if Vietnam had not been “foreign territory” but part of the United States, a fifty-first state — and if North Vietnamese terrorists had killed twenty-five hundred American civilians in the United States. And just imagine the scenario of the U.S. Army becoming so displeased with its own government’s conduct in Vietnam that it attempted to overthrow the American government by staging a coup in Washington. That is exactly what happened in France during the war in Algeria.[20]

The seven-year Algerian War of Independence, pitting some 1.3 million French troops against 330,000 Algerian revolutionaries, was the last colonial battle fought by any empire anywhere in the world. There would be other wars around the globe, waged over economic or political interests — Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Falkland Islands — but the Algerian struggle marked the end of empires.

It would take years for Algeria to restore the economy left derelict by the departure of the pieds noirs. Ahmed Ben Bella was overthrown in 1965 by one of his military chiefs, Houari Boumédiéne.[21] Beginning in 1992, when the Algerian army cancelled run-off elections in fear of a victory by Islamic extremists, Algeria underwent a long and bloody civil war that took 150,000 lives. Armed Islamic groups had carried out indiscriminate slaughter, wiping out entire villages. Never entirely suppressed, they would become known as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. This force remains a continuing source of terror attacks.

Charles de Gaulle pondered the consequences of the war in his memoirs: “The end of colonization was a chapter in our history. France felt a mixture of regret for what was past and hope for what was to come.”[22] As the curtain descended on Algérie française, his only certainty was that General de Gaulle (as he sometimes referred to himself) would remain in the game, resolute in his determination to “pursue his path and his vocation,” even at the risk of his own life.