A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (9 page)

But when, early in 1943, a Muslim delegation approached the Free French leader, General Giraud, with a petition of reforms, they were headed off with “I don’t care about reforms, I want soldiers first.” And, indeed, Algeria did provide France with soldiers — as in the First World War: magnificient Tirailleurs and Spahis, to whom General Juin was heavily indebted for his victorious progress through the grinding Italian campaign. These Algerian soldiers at the front were either largely unaware of, or had their backs turned upon, the turmoil brewing at home — until Sétif. But the camaraderie of the battle-front, their contact with the more privileged British and American troops, as well as the training they received, were things not to be lightly forgotten.

In 12 February 1943, Abbas produced his own “Atlantic Charter” called the “Manifesto of the Algerian People”. In a more virulent tone than heretofore, he claimed savagely: “The French colony only admits equality with Muslim Algeria on one level; sacrifice on the battlefields.” More ambitious than his previous demands, the “Manifesto” now marked a clear turning away from assimilation, calling for an “immediate and effective participation” of Muslims in the government and the establishment of a constitution guaranteeing
inter alia
, liberty and equality for all Algerians, the suppression of feudal property — as well as various other planks borrowed from the more radical platform of Messali. At this point, Messali was under house arrest (a sentence commuted from sixteen years’ hard labour imposed following an army mutiny in 1941), his P.P.A. was in dissolution and the Communist Party of Algeria (P.C.A.) banned — so, temporarily, Abbas reigned supreme. Next, in May 1943, pressed on by the followers of Messali, Abbas came out with a “Supplement” to the “Manifesto” which demanded nothing less than “an Algerian state” — though still through recourse only to legal and peaceful means.

This was too much for the French authorities, and Abbas too was consigned to house arrest. In protest against French policy the Muslim representatives on the Délégations Financières refused to take their seats that September. Perhaps realising that he had gone too far, Abbas recanted, affirming his “fidelity to France”, and was released again at the end of the year. Then, in January 1944, de Gaulle gave an epoch-making declaration in Brazzaville; it was French policy, he announced, amid some typical oratorical ambiguities “to lead each of the colonial peoples to a development that will permit them to administer themselves, and, later, to govern themselves”. Algerian Muslims were offered equal rights with French citizens, and an increase in the proportion of representatives in local government. To the Algerian nationalists this was little more than Blum-Viollette warmed up, and, by 1944, it was too little too late. (Nor, indeed — like other promises of reform — was the Brazzaville declaration ever to be implemented.) Abbas’s reaction was to bury the hatchet with Messali, and on 14 March in the fateful town of Sétif, and in another rare moment of unity, all the principal components of nationalism joined hands in a new grouping called Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (A.M.L.). In the most precise terms yet, it restated its aim as being “to propagate the idea of an Algerian nation, and the desire for an Algerian constitution with an autonomous republic federated to a renewed French republic, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist”. This new brief moment of unity was to perish finally amid the bloodshed and recriminations of Sétif the following year; nevertheless, the A.M.L. declaration did establish a principle of immense political and propaganda importance. Indeed, in the opinion of Albert Camus the movement was “the most original and significant that has been seen to emerge since the beginnings of the conquest”.

And so France in Algeria staggered from war into peace, her prestige in Algeria gravely tainted, her power and influence in the world sorely reduced. United in despair, the Algerian nationalists saw, in the ending of the war, prospects of a return to “colonialism as usual”, a powerful French army returning to police the country and aid the
pieds noirs
prevent implementation of the reforms they so ardently demanded. The scene was set for the terrible, unforeseen and unexpected explosion at Sétif — and, in its wake,
l’heure du gendarme
.

[
1
] In an interview with the author in October 1973, President Bourguiba of Tunisia persisted in the belief that “more than 50,000” had been killed after Sétif. Maître Teitgen, the liberal secretary-general of the Algiers prefecture in 1956–7, told the author that he reckoned the Muslim dead at “probably 15,000”. The discrepancy in the figures may (according to Robert Aron) be partly accounted for by the fact that many of the inhabitants of suspect
mechtas
“disappeared” into the hills in advance of the army
ratissages
, and were thus subsequently accounted for among the presumed dead.

[
2
] There are at least two schools of thought on the origins of
pied noir;
one, on account of the black polished shoes worn by the French military; the other based on the somewhat patronising view of metropolitan Frenchmen that the
colons
had had their feet burned black by an excess of the African sun.

[
3
] Meaning, literally, the “land of the setting sun”, the Maghreb embraces the western territories of the North African littoral: Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

[
4
] It would be unfair to extend it too far, as the British had never colonised India with a view to permanent settlement; to correspond with the
pied noir
problem there would have had to have been roughly 30 million Britons in India in 1947.

[
5
] The Algerian equivalent of pasha.

[
6
] The offices of Turco-Arab origin, cadi=judge and
caid
=a local governor, should not be confused.

[
7
] Hadj is a title bestowed on Muslims who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

[
8
] It will be noted that many of the nationalist intellectuals (like Ben Khedda, president of the provisional Algerian government in 1962, who was also a pharmacist) were doctors, pharmacists or lawyers — professions where Muslims generally encountered the least barriers to advancement.

[
9
]
Baraka
, hard to translate, is a special grace or good fortune accorded from on high.

CHAPTER TWO
Ici, c’est la France

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

Edmund Burke,
On Conciliation with America
, 1775

The country

SETTING the scene for the quite irrational murder of the anonymous Arab by his
pied noir
anti-hero, “The Outsider”, that great native-born writer of Algeria, Albert Camus, paints in words that scorch the mind:

There was the same red glare as far as the eye could reach, and small waves were lapping the hot sand in little, flurried gasps. As I slowly walked towards the boulders at the end of the beach I could feel my temples swelling under the impact of the light. It pressed upon me, trying to check my progress. And each time I felt a hot blast strike my forehead, I gritted my teeth, I clenched my fists in my trouser-pockets and keyed up every nerve to fend off the sun and the dark befuddlement it was pouring into me … all I had to do was to turn, walk away, and think no more about it. But the whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back.

He goes on, kills, and accepts — inarticulately and impassively — the penalty of the guillotine.

Environment shapes men, and none more so than the vast skies of Algeria — generally blazing down without pity or moderation, but capable of unpredictable, fierce change. Immense, beautiful, sudden, savage and harsh; one gropes inadequately for the right adjectives to describe the country. Distance never ceases to amaze; from Algiers to Tamanrasset in the barren, lunar mountains of the Hoggar is 1,300 miles, or roughly the same as from Newcastle to Algiers; from Algiers to Oran, a flea’s hop on the map of North Africa, is little short of 300 miles by road. Four times as big as metropolitan France, with its land area unchanged since the colonial era, present-day Algeria is the tenth largest country in the world. Nine-tenths of it are comprised by the endless Saharan under-belly that sags below the Atlas mountains, the endless wasteland of blistering rock and shifting sand. Sparsely inhabited by troops of wandering nomads, or exotic tribes like the Ouled-Nail, whose comely dancing daughters traditionally used to offer themselves as courtesans in other regions, then returned with rich dowries to transmute themselves into honoured wives, dotted with mysterious M’zabite cities such as Ghardaia, and policed by isolated Foreign Legion forts, the Sahara once formed the average Englishman’s romantic
Beau Geste
image of all Algeria. It is a world of seizing visual beauty, of shimmering whites and yellows that shift to glowing apricot, pink and violet with the sinking of the saturant sun. “A magnificently constructed Cubist painting,” was how an enraptured Simone de Beauvoir saw Ghardaia: “white and ochre rectangles, brushed with blue by the bright light, were piled on each other to form a pyramid.…” Few French soldiers remained impervious to its dangerous allures, yet this great backyard seemed real estate without value — until, during the Algerian war itself, discovery was made of the vast reserves of natural gas and oil that were to provide the basis of the wealth of independent Algeria.

For all its immense scale, the Algerian scene shifts with unexpected rapidity. Within a few hours’ drive northward from the desert oasis of Bou-Saada, you are up in the 7,000-foot Atlas range of the Djurdjura, where (as I once discovered to my cost) even as late as mid-May roads can be blocked or swept away by avalanches and landslides. Beyond the mountains lies a totally other world. The hundreds of miles of rugged, indented coastline where the Barbary pirates had their lairs is the true Mediterranean; but a Mediterranean where secret, sandy bays are often pounded by seas of Atlantic force. Parts of it, like the aptly named Turquoise Corniche, are as breathtaking as the Amalfi peninsula but without its hordes and hoardings. There is the beguiling Roman site of Tipasa, on its gentle promontory where “the sea sucks with the noise of kissing”, drenched at midday by the scent of wild absinthe, and where Camus repeatedly experienced “the happy lassitude of a wedding-day with the world”. In springtime the ruins are a blaze of contrapuntal colour: wild gladioli of magenta, bright yellow inulas and spiky acanthus thrust up among sarcophagi carpeted with tiny blue saxifrage and sprawled over by convolvulus with great pink trumpets. The ochre stones and iron red soil contrast joyously with the silvery-grey of the olives and absinthe and a peacock sea. “Here the gods themselves serve as tryst-places, or beds,” says Camus. “Happy is he among the living who has seen such things.” And happy, indeed, were the
pieds noirs
who, in the “good days” owned summer villas — such as one might find in Brittany or Arcachon — at Tipasa or on other stretches of Algeria’s unspoilt coast-line.

Pied noir Algeria

The centre of gravity of French colonisation lay close to the coast, with its big, Europeanised city ports of Algiers, Oran, Bougie, Philippeville and Bône, and the Mitidja — the rich, flat farmland which French ingenuity had created out of malarial swamps. Here, in country which might have been Languedoc, straight eucalyptus-shaded roads led through a prosperous and tidy succession of cereal and citrus farms, drenched with orange-blossom scent in May, and vast vineyards, owned by
pieds noirs
and operated by Muslim labour. The Mitidja towns — like Blida, where Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and André Gide once vied for the charms of “Arab boys as beautiful as bronze statues” — were unmistakably French. Their main squares, surrounded by well-pollarded plane trees (as well as containing the inevitable, graceless
monument aux morts
) would almost invariably boast a highly ornate bandstand where, of a Sunday, the band of the local garrison would endeavour to distract the
indigènes
from their lack of more worldly privileges with rousing martial music. The names of the townships founded by the
colons
were just as uncompromisingly French; Victor-Hugo, Rabelais, Orléansville, Aumale, Marengo and Inkermann.

Algiers itself, cradled in steep hills green with pine and palm that offer countless superb panoramas, was one of the pearls of French Mediterranean culture. Arriving by ship in its bay — which, next to Rio, must be one of the most beautiful in the world — one’s eyes were blinded by the massed whiteness of the terraces climbing up from the sea. It deserved its sobriquet of
Alger la Blanche
. High above Algiers on one side was perched Notre Dame d’Afrique, a Catholic shrine of prime sanctity for the
pieds noirs
(and also of appalling taste, a little reminiscent of Montmartre’s Sacré-Cœur), containing a black madonna with the paternalistic inscription “Pray for us and our Muslims”. On another hill nestled the luxurious Hôtel Saint-George, where General Eisenhower set up his Allied Headquarters in 1942, and through whose exotic gardens of giant contorted euphorbia and sweet-smelling moonflowers Churchill and the titans of the Second World War strolled, laying plans for a world in which Anglo-Saxon predominance seemed assured in perpetuity.[
1
] After the war it reverted to being a haven for senior French officials, high army brass and their ladies. Just down the hill from the Saint-George lay the Palais d’Été, a dazzling white mauresque mansion where the governor-general resided in full viceregal splendour. Once the centre of Algiers was the Place du Gouvernement, close to the harbour whence creep fishy smells, and where the corsairs used to auction their slaves; but the true solar plexus (and certainly in the years after 1954) was formed by the Plateau des Glières, leading up from the sea, past the palatial Hôtel des Postes, up steep steps to the imposing
monument aux morts
and thence to the open space, or Forum, in front of the modern block that housed the offices of the Gouvernement-Général.