French Places - the history, culture and conflicts of France - Algeria, De Gaulle
The Algerian War in Paris
History didn’t interest me much and politics even less, because nothing seemed really important to me except pleasure and beauty, and especially my own! But politics, which as Unamuno said is the hangover of history, was so omnipresent that year in Paris that it was impossible to ignore it.
I had lived in a parliamentary democracy such as Canada where no one discussed politics until election time, and also in a military dictatorship like Spain, where it was very dangerous to do so. France was a different sort of society, a republic with a king, where people talked about politics all the time but without being heard much at the top.
Violent disagreements were not discussed just before elections were held, and not put aside once they had been decided. Majority rule was upheld in principle but despised in practice, because each Frenchman was persuaded that most of his countrymen were likely to be either wrong or just plain bad.
When I first lived in France, the general who liberated the country from the Germans, Charles de Gaulle, was so conspicuously in power that even we thoughtless children knew something about him. Along with Winston Churchill he was the most colourful and imposing public figure of my century, something not even his enemies deny.
Another thing that made him different, even from Churchill, was that he had a divinely-inspired vision of what battered, humiliated France should become, and, being a very big man, he strode straight toward it with giant steps, crushing many flower beds as he went. One has only to see what France is today, a few generations later, to measure his success, even though he himself would find more than a few things to scorn.
The French were agonizing in 1961 over the impending independence of Algeria. For centuries the accursed city of Algiers– called “The Island” for the cluster of islets which French engineers joined to the port - was little more than a vast pirate stronghold.
Since the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, its corsairs had terrorized the Mediterranean and supplied its slave markets with infidels. European captives languished there for years awaiting ransom, or were sold as chattel if they had no relatives to pay. Not only did the Moorish pirates waylay ships but they raided fishing villages on the French and Spanish coasts, taking off everything and everyone that might be sold. Churches even had special alms boxes for gathering the ransom of destitute captives on the Barbary Coast, as the region was called, from the French Berberie, the land of the Berbers.
By the beginning of the 19th century, the Europeans were using modern warships to stamp out the Barbary curse once and for all. The American Navy, which traded extensively in the Mediterranean, refused to pay the tribute demanded of them for penetrating Ottoman waters and, on orders by Thomas Jefferson, waged two wars against the neighbouring Barbary state of Libya. Hence the line the Marines sing about fighting battles “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli”.
Algiers was finally conquered and occupied in 1830, by Charles X of France, the last Bourbon king, after a similar dispute with the Dey, or Turkish governor. The unpopular King who tried to bring back absolute monarchy used it as a pretext to curry favour with the French people, who longed for a return of the military glory of Napoleon’s days. It was his only victory in the field but, as he proudly put it, it resulted in the annihilation of an enemy which had “been plaguing Europe for three centuries”.
Later, under King Louis-Philippe, the foothold Charles had impulsively created in Algiers was used to create a much larger Mediterranean stronghold named “Algeria”, in order to make French traders more competitive with their British rivals. The French troops then set about ridding the land of the intractable natives, deliberately slaughtering one million people and laying waste to the land. Their general told them to murder anyone “who does not crawl before us like a dog”.
The idea was to frighten the remaining natives into the hinterland, to make way for the creation of French coastal towns. In the French view, therefore, the new country they had made was not a colony with a few administrators and a garrison to keep the natives under control, but an autonomous, overseas part of the national territory. The new rulers would send their own kinsmen to do the work, like the Boers in the Transvaal.
In 1870 Algeria was divided into three départements each having the same rights as in Metropolitan France, which, back then, seemed very generous and républicain. But the glaring flaw in this arrangement when judged by mid-20th century democratic standards was that only Algerians of European origin had the right to vote and to be French citizens, leaving the Muslims or indigènes in a voiceless sub-class.
It was a Latin form of apartheid, with more accent on culture than race. As with the persecution of the Jews later on, it was for the French more a crime of omission than one of malice. There were many attempts to give equal status to the natives: when Napoleon III visited Algeria he ordered that all the inhabitants should receive French citizenship regardless of their religion, and similar decrees in favour of equality were issued under the Third Republic which followed his Empire.
But in Algeria the “whites” – many of whom were not French but fanatically Catholic peasants from Spain and Italy, just a notch up on the scale of civilization from the Muslim peasants they oppressed – scorned these Parisian babblings about brotherhood with the despised bouniouls. They threw up so many obstacles for the natives to attain citizenship that very few ever did, and towards the end of the 19th century when France made mass education obligatory, they blocked the creation of schools for the natives, arguing that if they learned to speak French, and read it, they would be contaminated by egalitarian ideas and bite the hands than fed them. As a result, the vast majority of Arab children got no formal education at all, other than the Koranic madrassas, until the Second World War.
Republican principles to one side, the French in their hearts believed that Islamic religious law was backward and irrational, “the main cause of the decadence of the Muslim world” as Alexis de Tocqueville said, incompatible with the workings of a modern society. They feared, rightly or wrongly, that if the Muslim Arabs had the vote, they would use it to put their holy men in power.
This made it all the more advisable to build up the non-Muslim minority, but too few French people were interested in emigrating because of the great hardship of North African life. The land was infested with disease and bandits, snakes and even lions, and marauding tribes plundered and slaughtered the settlers like Indians in the Far West. Therefore, needier people from countries with similar climates and cultures, south-eastern Spain, southern Italy and Malta, were encouraged to settle in Algeria, and it was they who drained the marshes, cleared the farmlands, built the ports and cities.
A significant exception to this rule was the arrival, after 1870, of great numbers of settlers from Alsace and Lorraine, who came to represent most of the truly French Algerians. After France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, Bismarck seized the disputed region on the border with Germany, and many of the inhabitants who did not have Germanic roots accepted government incentives to start a new life in Algeria.
But this small advantage was wiped out by the advent of modern medical science and hygiene, which benefited not only European settlers but the natives too, with a spectacular drop in infantile mortality - in a country which at the time of independence registered the world's highest birth rate. Pasteur’s tide lifted all society’s ships so effectively that, by the time of which I am speaking, just one tenth of all Algerians were Europeans.
Life in the cities was French, with the Arabs out of sight in their casbahs, up to the anti-colonial movement that followed World War II. Most of the natives would have been satisfied with less, but the few privileged Arabs who had studied in Paris and Moscow wanted to take over from the French, and incited the masses to follow them on the road to total independence.
The mere thought of what the United Nations called “self-determination” was anathema to the Europeans, many of whom had roots in Algeria that stretched back a century, and in the case of the Jews back to the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and beyond. These pieds noirs - as the whites were contradictorily called by the Arabs, for the dark leather footwear of the officers and administrators – knew that independence would mean Arab rule and, they did not doubt, bring about the ruin of everything they and their forefathers had built up.
The liberal President Coty, when confronted with these demands, was torn between his visceral sympathy for the settlers and his republican commitment to the principles of equality and fraternity, especially since colonialism was on the wane everywhere in the world. Sensing that Coty was wavering, several army generals stationed in Algeria who supported the settlers demanded the return to power of the much stronger and more conservative Charles de Gaulle, who had resigned the French presidency several years before.
The generals believed that only de Gaulle had the moral authority to save the situation and maintain French rule in Algeria. As it was, the terrorist attacks of the two factions – the FLN, or National Liberation Front on the one side, and the OAS, or Secret Army Organization on the other - not only in Algeria but on the mainland as well, convinced de Gaulle that it was impossible to resist independence, and in a totally unexpected about-face – seen as a dastardly betrayal by the generals and the settlers - he set about turning the country over to the native Algerians.
To do this without losing his aura of neutrality, he invited the public in both France and Algeria to decide the issue in a series of referendums, knowing full well that they would vote for pulling out. This turning of the tide was what enraged the OAS, and they responded by setting off bombs in the streets of Paris, and killing both demonstrators and passers-by. It was less of a last-ditch attempt to change the course of events than an exaction of revenge.
Secretly, de Gaulle was against keeping Algeria from the beginning. He longed to rid his country of what he saw as an embarrassing anachronism, a reminder of a despotic past when kings conquered on a whim. He wanted France to stand among other modern nations, free from this backward jumble of squabbling breeds and creeds. Algeria was like a country bumpkin who turns up on the doorstop of his big city cousin demanding that he take his side in a dispute over the family farm, which is only worth something to himself.
From de Gaulle’s standpoint, the Algerians were a liability and he wanted to be free of the whole uneducated bunch of them, by means of what he elegantly called dégagement. He was fed up with France’s old-style army, too, with its overbearing generals who staged uprisings and assassinations as if they were in Central America, using code names like “Soleil”. He wanted a modern army of professionals for his country, which was soon to become a nuclear power, and threw the trouble-makers in prison until they were too old to make trouble.
What he did next was to simply dump Algeria, without the slightest pretence of indemnifying the losers or protecting the victims which such a cataclysmic change would create. When he made his famous declaration “France has no friends, only interests”, he did not only mean friends in foreign countries.
The white Algerians had to get out with what they could carry and received at the very best token damages for their lost property. Neither were they helped with subsidies to start a new life in France, which would have angered the trade unions.
A much worse fate awaited the harkis, the Arabs who had collaborated with the French in the war against the rebels. When their spokesman desperately warned de Gaulle that if he didn’t grant them asylum in France they would be certain to suffer revenge at the hands of their countrymen, he answered with a shrug of his shoulders, “So then, you shall suffer!”.
After independence, hundreds of whites were massacred in the streets by the rebels, as a warning of what those who planned to stay on could expect. A million “black feet” began flooding out of the country towards France, in a reverse repetition of the Jewish exodus from Germany to Palestine 15 years earlier, but with the difference that most of the Algerians, not being of French descent and in many cases never having been in France, had only a nominal tie to the country to which they were going.
There was scarce sympathy for them there, because the French had sickened of fighting to protect the colonialistic white minority in Algeria, who were seen as not being truly French or only French-descended. The bitter resistance of the pieds noirs and the terrorist attacks of the renegade generals were seen as unreasonable and anti-Republican. Frenchmen wondered why they should help these lazy land barons go on exploiting the Arab peasants, and when the refugees finally stumbled off the ships they were treated like slave-drivers, even though most of them were poor, ignorant workers and tradesmen.
Those who had left everything behind had to sleep in the streets of Marseille until they could start working their way up all over again. Some of the French tried to stay on in the hope that things would settle down, but finally left when the revolutionary government nationalized their businesses.
As for the benighted harkis, the Arab collaborators, 100,000 of them were stranded in Algeria, at the mercy of the new leaders. They were made to clear the mine fields they had laid by walking over them, to dig their own graves, to swallow their French medals before being castrated and shot with their wives and children.
The French army was never as cruel to the Algerians as their own National Liberation Front, and not only to those who collaborated with the enemy. Their dismal rule has until the present day, almost half a century later, truly been “a dictatorship of misery and sterility”, as de Gaulle himself warned in one of his referendum speeches. The underdogs became victors and set about making their own victims as soon as they were in command.
Even though I lived in France during the worst of this human tragedy - with the attempt to assassinate de Gaulle by rebel army officers and the flooding of southern seaports with desperate pieds noirs - I paid little attention to it all, amazing as it seems to me now. The newsreels we saw, with their chatter about Ben Bella and the Evian Agreements and the dramatic referendums, were like flickerings on the backdrop of a stage upon which my own glorious saga was being enacted, dwarfing the rest.
True, I had taken a passionate interest in Spanish politics, but that was because of the tragic, romantic nature of the situation there, with brutal generals and complacent priests lording it over a suffering people, and with the guiding lights of the country killed or in exile, martyrs like my beloved poet Lorca. By comparison with Francisco Franco, Charles de Gaulle appeared as a towering medieval knight living in the modern age, arrogant and chauvinistic but admirable too, even likeable. Neither could I imagine why the French made such a fuss over far-away Algeria, which as far as I knew was a barren, inhospitable place producing the bad wine we drank in 1-liter bottles with metal caps.
Since I didn’t identify with the causes being thrashed out or the people who defended them, I simply ignored what was happening as best I could. Now I realize that Charles de Gaulle was the greatest elected leader the French have ever had, in spite of the cruel decisions he took and the truths he concealed to keep his country together.
With hindsight, it seems likely that colonialism, even in its cruellest form, was less destructive than the rise of nepotism and barbarism which followed its usually violent, and in my opinion premature demise. There might be less failed nations today littering the planet if they had been born naturally fifty years later, rather than being plucked from the womb for ideological reasons.
Then, the only thing that touched my imagination about the war in Algeria was the letter I got from Yves, who was doing his military service in a harbour town called Philippeville. He said nothing about hunting down or torturing Arab rebels, somewhat to my disappointment, but actually seemed to be leading a tranquil existence in his camp. He had even been promoted, when the Captain discovered that he was qualified to coach other recruits who had been forced to leave school.
He sent me a strange gift called a “sand rose”, a formation of hardened sand which could be found in the desert, resembling the juxtaposed petals of a flower, or rose – really more like an open clam with several layers of shells. When I saw him again in Paris, he scarcely said a word about the violence in Algeria, or about the turmoil in France either, because we were too busy talking about bullfights, flamenco, nouvelle vague films, old and new friends. Beside all that, war was a bore!
Yet almost every night, as Lilo and I lay in bed at Rue Rennequin, not far from the Étoile, we could hear the bombs going off – the press called them plastiques, for a military explosive made of a jelly-like substance - and killing both leftist demonstrators and passers-by. The white tiles of the Metro stations we travelled through on our way home from the Latin Quarter were painted everywhere with the threatening words OAS ALGÉRIE FRANÇAISE, as well as, for the other side, OAS ASSASSIN.
Violent and often murderous demonstrations were held that winter to protest against right-wing terrorist attacks and the OAS’ refusal to accept the results of the referendums and the will of the people. Officially the police were supposed to protect these citizens who were only upholding the law, but instead they harassed and even attacked them, whenever there were no journalists around to report it.
This extraordinary state of affairs had two causes. The first was that the Paris Police Chief had served in Algeria and used torture and murder against the rebels there, displaying a vigorous loathing and contempt for the FLN and by association all Arabs. In France as well as in Algeria, the rebels had killed many policemen and soldiers (just as the policemen and soldiers had killed and also tortured many of the natives). Therefore les flics, or “the cops”, wanted to avenge their fallen comrades.
The other reason was that the general public was alarmed by OAS propaganda claiming that the government was abandoning Algeria because it had been infiltrated by the communist party. Since many of the street demonstrations were started by members of left-wing trade unions and the French communist party, to display their solidarity with the Arab cause, the government always turned turn a blind eye when they were bludgeoned, sometimes to death, because it showed that these accusations were false.
Two of these street clashes went down in history, once the full truth about them began to emerge, some thirty years later. One demonstration was held in October by thousands of Algerian Arabs, protesting the new curfew ordering all “Muslims” to stay off the streets after dark. It had been brutally enforced by arresting all people who looked like Algerians, which included Tunisians and Moroccans, and even some Spanish and Italian immigrants.
Since the march violated the curfew, the police charged, forcing the people across the Pont Saint Michel from the Latin Quarter. Anyone brave enough to take part must have known how dangerous it was. It can be assumed that taunts and insults were exchanged and that fighting broke out, with cobblestones being thrown against a wall of shields and helmets.
The press remained mute, but it is known now that dozens of Arabs were thrown into the water with their hands tied; some of their bodies were found far downstream, weeks later. Others were herded across the river and into the central police station near the Cathedral, where dozens more were beaten to death in the courtyard. The Police Chief encouraged the officers to take revenge for their comrades, over the protests of a small group of policemen who stood helplessly by.
The other was in February in a working class district on the east side of Paris, organized by French leftists. When the police charged, many were crushed underfoot or beaten to death inside the Charonne metro station where they had sought refuge.
It is hard for me to understand how de Gaulle could have allowed these crimes to go unpunished, even if he didn’t consciously permit them. After struggling for so long against the Germans, he may have discovered that civil war is even more hateful and cruel than fighting an unseen enemy, and harder to bring to an end. Perhaps that is why he wanted to stamp out and discourage any further disorder in the streets, at whatever cost - and even though the demonstrators theoretically supported his own decision to leave Algeria. The difference was that de Gaulle had taken his decision reluctantly since he was a nationalist at heart, while the Arabs had so much to lose and and the leftists to gain that they were ready to die for it if necessary.
When de Gaulle saw the country he had liberated in 1944 sliding into chaos, with governments succeeding one another every six months, he resolved to show the people and the world that the state authority was supreme, almost sacred. To keep at bay what he saw as the dire threat of communism, he was willing to appoint a Nazi collaborator like Papon to head the Paris police force, even if he was personally distasteful to him.
The Algerian dilemma made of de Gaulle a conservative president forced to take a liberal decision, but he had no intention of giving the benefit of the doubt to his enemies, so he stood by while the cops roughed them up. At any rate, it was not until recently – some thirty years after the massacres – that Maurice Papon was brought to trial and stripped of his many medals, not for what he did in the Algerian war, but for having, ten years before, willingly deported French Jews to Auschwitz under the Vichy government.
But Paris that winter could not have seemed more peaceful, or enchanting. We scarcely saw or even heard of any of the demonstrations – “manifs”, as they were called, short for manifestations - except one we got caught up in, as we came out of a Latin Quarter cinema late one evening. My friend Javier Cantalejos, who had finally given up being a penniless student in Madrid and taken a factory job in Stuttgart, spent a few days in Paris with me and Lilo on the way to his new life. That night, as we were about to cross the Boulevard Saint Michel, a crowd of demonstrators came running down the hill in our direction with the police on their heels. Traffic had been cut off and it was quite dark, with only a few cafés and street lights eerily illuminating the scene.
Instead of getting out of the way as we should have done, we stood on the sidewalk to watch them run by. The policemen were swatting at the students with their night sticks curiously folded up in their capes, which may either have been to cushion the blows or simply to hide the sticks. One of them suddenly turned on us, as if we were demonstrators pretending to be onlookers. He swung his cape at Lilo – undoubtedly mistaking her for a boy - and struck her once across the back, before following the others down to the river.
The poor thing wept so bitterly! We lifted her sweater and saw that the blow had left a long red welt across her back. Being Lilo, she bitterly insisted that it was an attack on her person, rather than the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We took her home on the Metro and I tried to soothe her.
Javier didn’t take it as dramatically as we did, though, and kept saying that what she had suffered was nothing compared to the drubbings he and his buddies got in Madrid, when they protested against Franco. Lilo rightly felt that he was sneering at her for making such a fuss, and when I thought he had gone too far with his scoffing I asked him to shut up.
He acquiesced at the moment, but took it badly, because after he went off to Germany I never heard from him again. It saddened rather than surprised me, having been fond of the irrepressible rascal, especially since he had been the first person to befriend me when I arrived in Madrid, indeed in Europe.
It wasn’t the first time, though, that I had fought with a friend because he and Lilo crossed swords – the same thing had happened with Manolo the previous summer, although in that case I managed to patch it up. Javier was a typical Spaniard who thought women were at best brainless dolls, and Lilo was a German tomboy with a deep grudge against men like him, so they couldn’t have seen eye to eye, especially when politics, which Javier felt so strongly about, was involved.
I knew Lilo was justified but, once I took stock of the damage, I held it against her, for taking his ravings so seriously. With an attitude like hers, I thought, you would be sure to end up only talking to people who agreed with you, and never getting to know more unusual ones like Javier, who apart from being a lot of fun was a loyal friend.
For me, the point of travelling was not just the beauty of the places you discovered but the often distasteful different-ness of the people you met. If you refuse to make friends with strangers because they don’t think like you do, I thought, you might as well stay home with your own like-minded tribe. Which is what dear Lilo ended up doing!
xxx