A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (57 page)

Aged twenty-seven and born in France, Lagaillarde had passed his childhood in Blida where both his parents had practised law. But the forebear with whom Lagaillarde liked most to identify himself was his great-grandfather, an obscure deputy and revolutionary called Baudin who had found immortality in the 1851 uprising against Louis-Napoleon. Leaping on top of a barricade and crying “I’ll show you how one dies for twenty-five sous a day,” he had been promptly shot.[
2
] Lagaillarde himself had returned to study law at Algiers University the previous autumn, having completed his military service as a
sous-lieutenant
with the paras. This had taken him to Suez and through the Battle of Algiers, and the redoubtable Colonel Trinquier had been sufficiently impressed to invite him to stay on, which Lagaillarde had refused with the contemptuous rebuff: “The paras have every physical courage, but no civil courage!” Nevertheless, he seldom missed an opportunity to appear (improperly) in uniform. The Brombergers describe Lagaillarde as “a character in search of an author, wanting to be a Siegfried or a d’Artagnan”. But with his tall, lean figure, carpet-fringe beard and unsmiling face, Lagaillarde when wearing the shapeless and wrinkled “leopard” combat kit of the para evoked more closely the “Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance”. Sometimes Ortiz,
mutatis mutandis
, played an unwittingly droll but unfunny Sancho Panza. Frequently Lagaillarde’s gestures were neither less grandiloquent nor less absurd than Don Quixote’s. But he was indisputably a man of action. At the university the staccato laugh and raucous, rabble-rousing oratory, as well as his sheer panache, had at once made Lagaillarde a natural leader. Taking over the Association Générale des Étudiants d’Algérie (A.G.E.A.) he had launched it fiercely into “ultra” politics.

Lagaillarde regarded the Gaullist “antenna” with detached contempt, remarking to Nez-de-Cuir at an early stage that he wanted “to have nothing to do with the Punch-and-Judy
coup d’état
of M. Chaban-Delmas”. His fellow members of “The Group of Seven” went even further in their antipathy to de Gaulle. In this they were representative of the deep-seated Pétainist inclinations of the
pieds noirs
, inherited from the internal conflicts of French North Africa during the Second World War. Moreover, the immediate goals of the “Seven” and Delbecque’s
comité de vigilance
differed radically both in range and breadth. The “Seven” wanted the army to take over in Algeria to preserve
Algérie française
, to give them independence from the French parliament in its present mood, but without any suggestion of going so far as Ian Smith in Rhodesia. There was no thought of “What then?”; and—which was typical of the inward-looking and insular mentality of the
pied noir
—no thought about France’s own predicament above and beyond the problem of the Algerian war. For the Gaullists the whole “State of France” was what was at issue, of which Algeria was but part. It was admittedly a very large part, but the progressive revelation of its relativity in the mind of de Gaulle himself was to be the source of the bitterest and most dangerous disillusions in the years to come. Thus to maintain harmony between two such uneasy bedfellows was to require the utmost diplomacy and adroitness on the part of Nez-de-Cuir—greatly aided by the unexpected turn of events.

… and de Gaulle

In all this there remains one essential and enigmatic actor—the King over the Water himself. Twelve years had passed since he summarily abandoned the presidency on the mystical motivation of preserving “the spiritual national investment” from being sullied by party politics. It had been his determination to wait, and “for whatever length of time was necessary, let the party system display its noxiousness once more, determined as I was not to act as a cover or a figurehead for it. So I would depart, but intact.” During these long years he had withdrawn to live in a state of genteel poverty as squire of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises with his wife and handicapped daughter, Anne. At one time in financial straits, he had been helped out with a loan arranged by a banker named Pompidou. From his lofty vantage-point he had observed with a mixture of disdain and despair “the convolutions of this absurd ballet…seventeen prime ministers, representing twenty-four ministries”. In 1952 the Gaullist R.P.F., feeling abandoned by the leader, had split; as one of their number explained: “To wait in immobility for the national catastrophe, assuredly without wishing for it, so that General de Gaulle can be called to power, seems to us an insufficient plan of action.” De Gaulle in turn felt “betrayed” as the faithful accepted ministries under the Fourth Republic. That same year he had renounced public life in its entirety, and settled down to write his memoirs. Publication of the first volume, coinciding with the outbreak of the Algerian war, had been a spectacular success, but most of the sixty million (old) francs of royalties he was to receive were spent on a foundation for children suffering from the same malady as the adored Anne, who had died in 1948. By May 1958 he was at work on volume three,
Le Salut
, announcing to his publishers that he expected to deliver that October.

In those years of withdrawal he had read voraciously and eclectically—Saint-Simon, Châteaubriand, Bergson and Bismarck, manuals on gardening and saddle-making, and even Françoise Sagan and Hemingway’s
The Old
Man and the Sea
, with whose hero he affected to identify himself. He had travelled a little, and wherever he had stopped in the French Commonwealth warmest enthusiasm had greeted him. But above all he had thought, abstractly and with the objectivity that distance lends. For de Gaulle these were years of contemplation and spiritual regeneration, comparable to St John the Baptist in the desert, Lenin in exile, Winston Churchill in the political wilderness of the 1930s, and Konrad Adenauer at the monastery of Maria Laachs as a refugee from Nazism. It was this detachment which was to enable him to time to perfection the moment when, as he phrased it, “I would release the
deus ex machina
, in other words make my entrance.”

He had also grown old, resentfully—for, as he had remarked of Pétain, “Old age is a shipwreck.” As far back as 1948, ten years previously, Janet Flanner had commented unkindly: “Time, weight, and, evidently, the General’s glands are giving his visage a heavy, royal outline; he looks more like a man of dynasty than of destiny”. In order to preserve his deteriorating eyesight, he had given up smoking, but had still had to undergo recently an operation for cataract. This gave him a kind of agoraphobia, and made him uncertain in public without spectacles at hand. The belly had sagged, the face was greyer, the voice had lost something of its resonance. He was sixty-seven. But, as he had flatteringly been told by a youth movement delegate on the day Gaillard fell, “Stalin was older than you!” By the beginning of 1958 he may have seemed to the world at large a forgotten man, a legend but no longer a potential saviour of France; however, over all the years he himself had not abandoned the belief that France would call for him one day. He had not for a moment doubted “that the infirmity of the system would sooner or later lead to a grave national crisis”. But there had been times when, after so many years in the wilderness, the flame of hope flickered low. As late as April 1958, resorting to the majestic third person singular in which he habitually referred to himself, he had remarked gloomily to Delbecque: “They will create a burnt earth, they will wait until there is nothing left before calling for de Gaulle! I shall never come back to power in my lifetime.”

In response to the importuning of the Gaullist conspirators, their pressure mounting powerfully since the fall of Gaillard, he had remained characteristically aloof and enigmatic. France would have to want him very badly. Hints had been dropped; in January he told Tournoux that he considered the French government to be no longer legitimate, in that “it could no longer assure either its defence, or the security of its territory”—a clear reference to Algeria, for those who wished to find one. His price for returning, clearly implied, was the complete replacement of the system of the Fourth Republic; he would only come back if a vast majority of the French nation wanted him; he would not come back as the prisoner of any one faction, especially not on the bayonets of the army. Apart from this, all the rest was pure conjecture—and ambiguity. In despair at the state of France, pressed by the perils of the moment, his supporters permitted themselves to read into the delphic utterances what each wanted for himself. Over Algeria the ambiguity was particularly pronounced—the source of much heart-searching in the years to come. In the Second World War days in North Africa, Harold Macmillan recalls of de Gaulle that his “whole purpose” was to “sustain the spirit of France and to preserve the integrity of the French Empire”. But by France’s non-white subjects he was also revered as the “man of Brazzaville” in memory of his historic speech there of January 1944, when he declared that it would be French policy “to lead each of the colonial peoples to a development that will permit them to administer themselves and, later, to govern themselves….” He viewed “integrity of the French Empire” as an adjunct—and therefore secondary—to the mystic
grandeur
of France, rather than something with any more practical value in itself. That elephantine memory, unforgetting and unforgiving, had unhappiest memories of the Pétainist establishment in wartime Algiers; he had little instinctive sympathy with the self-made
grands colons
, any more than he could identify himself with the aspirations and anxieties of the
petits blancs
. After an interview with him in 1958, Edmond Michelet and Maurice Schumann both came away with the impression that de Gaulle’s desire for peace went as far as being prepared to “do a deal” with the F.L.N.; to an astonished Austrian journalist close to the F.L.N., Artur Rosenberg, he had declared in April, “Certainly Algeria will be independent.” Meanwhile, the army, Soustelle and the rest were convincing themselves that de Gaulle would stand unfalteringly for
Algérie française
. Louis Joxe, one of de Gaulle’s closer confidants, was perhaps nearer to the truth when he noted in conversation with de Gaulle shortly before his return to power that “he spoke of everything but Algeria—because he didn’t want to come back for Algeria only”. As Brian Crozier aptly remarks in his biography of de Gaulle: “For the army and the settlers,
Algérie française
was all; for him, it was only one element in the complex picture of his deferred ambitions….”

9 May: Salan’s telegram

In the midst of all the plotting, the news on 9 May of the execution of the three French soldiers hit over-excited Algiers like a whip across the face. The spontaneous
pied noir
reaction was, “So these are the kind of assassins Pflimlin wants to negotiate with…!” The army was enraged and outraged. It was the last blow that it could take. Already earlier that day General Salan, who had hitherto turned a prudently cold front equally to the clamour of “The Group of Seven” and to the manoeuvrings of the Gaullist “antenna”, had despatched a long telegram to General Ely, the Chief of the General Staff, in Paris.

The present crisis [it began] shows that the political parties are profoundly divided over the Algerian question. The Press permits one to think that the abandonment of Algeria would be envisaged in the diplomatic processes which would begin with negotiations aiming at a “cease-fire”….

The army in Algeria is troubled by recognition of its responsibility towards the men who are fighting and risking a useless sacrifice if the representatives of the nation are not determined to maintain
Algérie française
….

The French army, in its unanimity, would feel outraged by the abandonment of this national patrimony. One cannot predict how it would react in its despair….

I request you to bring to the attention of the President of the Republic our anguish, which only a government firmly determined to maintain our flag in Algeria can efface.

It was a clear-cut ultimatum. Virtually for the first time since Napoleon’s coup of the 18th Brumaire a French army was about to intervene directly in national politics.

Lacoste leaves

Salan followed up this telegram by announcing that, on 13 May, there would be a ceremony at the
monument aux morts
to render homage to the three dead soldiers, and requested that the
anciens combattants
organisations should take part. That evening, accompanied by Generals Jouhaud, Allard and Massu, as well as Admiral Auboyneau commanding the Mediterranean fleet, Salan presented himself to Lacoste to show him the telegram. That same day Lacoste had come under heavy pressure from Sérigny to publish a signed article in the
Écho
calling for a committee of public safety. At first Lacoste appeared favourably inclined; but overnight his Socialist principles asserted themselves, and on the 10th he informed Sérigny that what he asked was tantamount to requiring him to break with the Socialist party; and that was “as if you were asking me to leave my wife after thirty-two years of marriage”. Instead, Lacoste promised that he would personally convey the request to the President of the Republic, “since that is just about all that’s left”. His last words were, “Avoid violence.” Then Lacoste left Algiers, like a thief in the night, in marked contrast to the flamboyant departure of his predecessor, Soustelle, saying that he would return after his consultations with President Coty, but sensing that he never would.[
3
] Behind him he left the ruins of the never-to-be-enacted
loi-cadre
, and all the aspirations of his twenty-seven months in office. In Algiers there was now no governor-general; in Paris, no government. A chasm gaped enticingly.