Algerian War Reading

[Yosy]

This was taken from a site that, the last time I checked, was off-line. I don't remember the adress, but its such a good essay that I saved it to my hard-drive. The essay is made up of an introduction and 9 chapters. I'll post on chapter at a time.

So, without further ado, here's the introduction.

The Algerian Civil War, 1954-1962: Why Such a Bitter Conflict?

At noon on March 19, 1962, the cease-fire, which had been agreed upon the previous day at the signing of the Evian accords, went into effect. It put an end "to the military operations and armed struggle throughout Algerian territory." So ended a ninety-two month war which had taken a very heavy toll on both sides.

In Algeria the conflict resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead, the displacement of millions of peasants, and the dismantling of the economy. In addition, it brought the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale) to power, a group that presented itself as the sole heir to Algerian nationalism. Benefiting from extraordinary popularity among the Algerian masses in 1962, it subsequently took root as the only party and, for nearly thirty years, negated any political or cultural pluralism.

In France, although there were far fewer casualties, the trauma was no less intense. Do we need to recall that nearly 2 million French soldiers crossed the Mediterranean between 1955 and 1962, that is, most young people born between 1932 and 1943 who were eligible to be called up? An entire generation thus found itself embarked upon a war whose stakes it did not understand. Politically, the conflict led to the fall of six prime ministers and the collapse of one Republic.

The war of Algerian independence, then, was one of the two cruelest wars of French decolonization in this century; the other was the war in Indochina (1946-1954). How are 'we to understand the bitterness of the Algerian conflict?

When the insurrection of November 1, 1954, erupted, the motto of Francois Mitterrand, then minister of the interior in the cabinet of Pierre Mendes France, was: "Algeria is France." Algeria constituted three French departments. Thus it was much more than a distant colony like Senegal or a mere protectorate like Tunisia.

After the very deadly conquest begun in 1830, which translated into a dispossession of the Muslim Algerians' land, a large settlement colony took root (Stora 1991a). By 1954, nearly 1 million Europeans, who would later be called pieds noirs, had worked and lived there for generations. Not all of them were "big colons" overseeing their land holdings. Most had a lower standard of living than residents of the metropolis. That colony of proletarianized settlements was represented by the traditional major parties of the French Hexagon (on the left and the right), whose operations and conceptions were based on the model of Jacobin centralization.

In the late nineteenth century, Algeria was not administrated by the Ministry of Colonies, but rather belonged to the Ministry of the Interior. Therefore, it seemed out of the question to abandon a territory attached to France for the past one hundred and thirty years, even longer than Savoy (1860). In the course of the war itself, the discovery of oil and the decision to use the vast Sahara for the first nuclear or space experiments came to be added to these rationales.

France thus sent its soldiers to fight in a "southern" French territory that was demanding its right to secede. Nine million Muslim Algerians were sham citizens of a Republic that saw itself as assimilationist: since 1947, they had voted in a college separate from that of Europeans. The principle of equality, "one man, one vote," was not respected. The idea of independence, shared by a growing proportion of Algerians, seemed to be the only way to undo that contradiction.

When the war ended, people on either side of the Mediterranean labored to efface its real and bloody traces. In France, there was no commemoration to perpetuate the memory of the soldiers on all sides, and the succession of amnesties led people to forget a shameful conflict. In Algeria, a commemorative frenzy founded the legitimacy of the military state, dissimulating the pluralism and clashes that had existed between the pro-independence movements and within the FLN itself.

For a long time, however, the memories of seven years of war resisted effacement. The pain and rage of the drama's protagonists permeated the field of writing about that history. Nearly forty years later the war in Algeria has begun to be an object of historical study. New paths of reflection and knowledge are opening up regarding the war mentality, the deadly propaganda, the social practices, the confusion of civilians, the attitudes held in the regions of France and Algeria, and the shaky involvements and retreats of individuals and groups.

[Jedburgh]

For a long time, however, the memories of seven years of war resisted effacement. The pain and rage of the drama's protagonists permeated the field of writing about that history. Nearly forty years later the war in Algeria has begun to be an object of historical study. New paths of reflection and knowledge are opening up regarding the war mentality, the deadly propaganda, the social practices, the confusion of civilians, the attitudes held in the regions of France and Algeria, and the shaky involvements and retreats of individuals and groups.
Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 was first published back in '78, yet it remains to this day the definitive history of the war. The book is very evenhanded, unmarred and not biased in any way by the "pain and rage of the drama's protagonists". Its an excellent read and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in that conflict, or insurgency in general.

[Yosy]

^^^^interesting

Chapter 1, The "Phony War" (November 1954-July 1955)

October, Eve of a War

In October 1954, France was living at the slow pace of the Fourth Republic, which had borrowed a great deal from the Third. Politics always took place in sealed offices; elected officials in the provinces rushed from banquets to inaugurations and from hollow speeches to obscure disputes. Rene Coty was in the Elysee Palace, and Pierre Mendes-France was premier in the Hotel Matignon. For nine years, Charles de Gaulle, having withdrawn from public affairs, had been biding his time in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. Guy Mollet, his spectacles at the tip of his nose, watched the omnipotent SFIO, one of the ancestors of the present-day Parti Socialiste, from the corner of his eye. The Communists were still shaken up over the death of Stalin, which had occurred twenty months earlier. Nasser was the strongman in Cairo, and his revolution of Arab nationalism was continuing.

Eisenhower was in the White House. He had just named a black man to be general of the U.S. Army's Air Force. He was the first. In London, Admiral Mountbatten was named First Sea Lord. In Stockholm, the Nobel Prize committee gave its award to a war writer, Ernest Hemingway. The decision was poorly received. Italian troops had just reentered Trieste, which the Yugoslavs had returned to them. Scenes of jubilation. In Paris, the Franco-German accords on the Saar were signed. People everywhere wanted to settle the accounts of World War 2.

But how many dark spots were on the planet! In the USSR, the gulag did not die with Stalin; in Africa, decolonization was yet to come; whole stretches of Asia wallowed in poverty and underdevelopment. In China, the Communists had taken power five years earlier. The term "Third World" appeared and circulated to designate these impoverished zones. Franco still held Spain under his sway. And, in the United States, McCarthyism was raging. Batista was elected in Cuba; he would very quickly become a fierce dictator.

Officially, France was at peace. On the other side of the Mediterranean, in Carthage in July 1954, Pierre Mendes-France had promised an evolution toward autonomy for Tunisia and Morocco, which had been on the brink of a general rebellion for three years. The true war, the war in Indochina, was over. Bigeard and many emaciated, defeated paratrooper officers left the Viet Minh prison camps. They were reflecting on the causes of the military defeat of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954, a terrible lesson they were not ready to forget.

The weekend of late October 1954 was deadly: thirty-four perished. The highways were beginning to kill in great numbers. France was confronting the problems of a nation at peace that was beginning to grow richer. Its victims, and its defeats, were now in sports stadiums. In the Parc des Princes, Puig Aubert had just led the XIII of France [a soccer team] to a victory over New Zealand. The stabilization of prices, achieved under the premiership of Antoine Pinay in 1952, was a major event. The old specter of price inflation that had so profoundly marked the postwar period was vanishing. This fact reduced "the diplomatic and colonial catastrophes to the rank of political mishaps, and thus comforted the French, who intended to take advantage of the fruits of the expansion once they had got on their feet by consolidating their purchasing power"(Rioux 1990).

Cultural news remained plentiful in 1954, however. People were reading the latest Prix Goncourt, Les Mandarins by Sirnone de Beauvoir, which was a fresco of a social milieu she knew by heart. That year, Francoise Sagan, a young new writer from a good family, published her first novel, whose title was borrowed from Paul Eluard: Bonjour tristesse. Jean Giono, who pub- lished Voyage en ltalie, was received into the Academie Goncourt. Nor was Albert Camus absent from that landscape. A collection of his texts con- tributed to the debate of ideas of the moment (Aauelles II), and a long prose text, haunted by flashes of insight and by worry, also appeared (L 'Ete). In October 1954, in darkened theaters film lovers could see rouchez pas au grisbi, by the great Jacques Becker, who was in a certain sense the heir to Jean Renoir; rant qu'il y aura des hommes, by Fred Zinnemann; Roman Holiday, by WIlliam Wyler, with Audrey Hepburn; On the Waterfront, by Elia Kazan; and Dial M for Murder, by Alfred Hitchcock.

On October 31 the deputies packed their bags, preparing to return to Paris, where the parliamentary session was set to reopen in two days. Pierre Mendes-France, the man who had made peace in Indochina, was preparing to leave for the United States. He was dreaming of reshuffling his cabinet. The previous week he had offered five Socialists a place in his government. The French stock market immediately dropped, then rose again, reassured. Edgar Faure would remain at Finances until the budget vote.

All Saint's Day 1954 began with a symbol. Very far away, in Pondicherry, the sun rose on a new flag. It was green, orange, and white. At sunset on the previous day, the French flag, still waving on the largest of the four trading posts, had been removed. The empire of French India no longer existed. Everything had gone well in Pondicherry.

The Outburst

Between midnight and two o'clock a.m. on November 1, 1954, Algeria was awakened by explosions. From Constantinois to Oranie, fires and commando attacks revealed the existence of a concerted, coordinated move- ment. In Algiers, Boufarik, Boulra, Batna, Khenchela, and on and on, thirty almost simultaneous attacks on military or police targets were perpetrated.

Very quickly, Francois Mitterrand, minister of the interior, placed three companies of state security police (CRS), that is, six hundred men, at the disposal of the Algerian general government; they flew from Paris in the early afternoon. A first battalion of paratroopers moved in under the command of Colonel Ducoumeau. Three others followed the next day. In fact, the war secretary was already in place in Algiers for a different reason: he was also a deputy and mayor of the city. This was Jacques Chevallier. The SFIO daily, Le Populaire, was upset: "The attacks came precisely at a time when France has a government whose comprehensive policy in North Africa is likely to bring calm everywhere there has been tension." The fact is, on that day, it was a hard fall for Paris. Hadn't Francois Mitterrand come back from his trip to Algeria some weeks earlier with the feeling that things were going better there?

The insurrection caused the death of seven people. The murder of the teacher Guy Monnerot in the Aures and of the pro-French kaid from M'Chouneche, Hadj Sadok, elicited strong emotion. But the attacks against the police stations, barracks, and industrial plants did not have the scope that the initiators of the November 1 attacks had hoped. In Algiers the net- work set in place was broken up by the police in less than two weeks. Only the Aures in Constantinois posed a real military problem: there, the "rebels" secured the cooperation of "bandits of honor" (in particular, the famous Grine Belkacem), who had been in the underground for years. There was also Great Kabylia, where several hundred men, trained in clandestine operations under the leadership of Amar Ouamrane and Krim BeIkacem, were ready for prolonged action.

On November 1 no one seriously thought that France had just entered a new war. The "events" made two columns in Le Monde. A single column in L'Express, dated November 6, violently denounced the "subversive schemes" of the Arab League and the old leader of the radical pro-independence cur- rent, Messali Hadj. Yet he was not the one behind the November 1 outburst; rather, it was other young leaders, in revolt against the French colonial pres- ence and the conservatism of their own party, which was torn apart by internal struggles.

The Men of November

On November I, 1954, an organization, heretofore unknown, claimed responsibility for all the military operations: the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN). That "rebellion" was conducted internally by six men: Larbi Ben M'Hidi, Didouche Mourad, Rabah Bitat, Krim Belkacem, Mohammed Boudiaf, and Mostefa Ben Boulald. The acts outside Algeria, in Cairo, were spearheaded by Hocine A:it Ahmed, Ahmed Ben Bella, and Mohammed Khider. All were from a single organization, the Parti du Peuple Algerien/Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertes Democratiques (pPA-MTLD), which had nearly twenty thousand militants in its ranks. For several years, all had been involved in the political struggle championed by the party.

It was on the basis of a claim for the autonomy of a "culture, heir to a long and glorious past, " and for an entitlement transmitted by history, that this movement worked to legitimate the demand for independence. In that sense, Arab Islamism appeared as a return to the source of ancestral ethics. A centralizing movement, it tended to struggle against particularism, especially linguistic particularism. This was clear in 1949 when the advocates of Berber culture, denounced as "Berber materialists," were discharged from their leadership posts. The PPA-MTLD championed a strategy of scission with the French presence. Its young activists, advocates of armed struggle, laid the foundations for the 1'1..N, and clashed violently with the old head of the PPA-MTLD, Messali Hadj, who founded the Mouvement National Algerien, or MNA (National Algerian Movement) in December 1954.

Within the leadership of this "activist" current, the youngest person (Omar Belouizdad) was twenty-six in 1954, the oldest (Mostefa Ben Boulald) was thirty-seven. Only one of these leaders, Mohammed Khider (age forty-two in 1954), who joined the group on the eve of November 1, was familiar with Etoile Nord-Africaine, the first pro-independence organization in 1936; he had been involved in the political holdup of the Oran post office, organized in 1949 by the OS (the branch of the PPA-MTLD charged with paving the way for a military insurrection, which was broken up by the French police in 1950-1951). This fact is not without importance. What united these men was that all of them, without exception and whatever their age, had been part of the OS, and had had to flee and hide to avoid repression. The orientation they gave to transmitting the legacy bequeathed by the pioneers of nationalism can be summed up in their recourse to direct action. Many activist cadres in the PPA who were called upon to playa "his- toric" role in the subsequent conduct of the Algerian revolution came from important families, themselves affected by the general downward mobility at work in Algerian society.

Hocine Alt Ahmed, born on August 20, 1926, in A1n-el-Hammam (formerly Michelet) came from a very important line of Marabouts from Kabylia. Larbi Ben M'Hidi, born in 1923, in the douar of El Kouahi in Constantinois, near A1n M'Lila, came from a family of Marabout notables from the high plains of Constantinois. Mohamed Boudiaf, born on June 23, 1919, in M'Sila in Hodna, was from a well-off family that had lost its status as a result of decolonization. Krim Belkacem, born on December 14, 1922, in the douar of Alt Yahia near Dra-EI-Mizan in Kabylia, was the son of a village policeman, Hocine Krim, who was eventually named a minor kaid. Extremely well known, these four leaders joined the PPA during World War II and rapidly obtained significant responsibilities. They had all gone to school: Alt Ahmed passed the first part of the baccalauriat (high school degree); Boudiaf went to the secondary school of Bou Sa ada; Larbi Ben M'Hidi studied the dramatic arts; and Krim Belkacem earned his certificat d'itUdes (primary,school diploma). These studies ended when the men entered politics and went underground.

Although the sons of important rural families were affected by pro-independence propaganda, there were also nationalists who belonged to the category of notables, beginning with the interwar period. These are particularly unusual examples, but they deserve to be pointed out as well, since they indicate the shift in the rural areas from a situation of resistance to foreigners to modern national feeling. A very well-known leader, Mostefa Ben Boula1d, is a telling example of the presence of that social category within the leadership of the pro-independence current. Born in 1917, he was the son of small landowners. He succeeded his father and became a miller by profession. Mobilized in 1939, he fought in the French army, was discharged after being wounded in 1942, then remobilized in 1943-1944 in Khenchela. As a chief warrant officer returned to civilian life, he became president of me guild of fabric merchants in me Aures, and established a small flour mill in Lambessa. At mat time, he obtained a license to operate a line of buses between Arris and Batna. The results of his life journey are well known: a member of me central committee of me MTLD and founding member, in Apri11954, of me CRUA (comite Revolutionnaire pour l'Unite et l'Action), which would give rise to me FLN, he died in combat in 1956.

The new political activists, living in the midst of varied activities, suspecting they might be able to escape their social conditions through me studies they had undertaken or me positions they occupied, discovered different ways of life, different possibilities for political action. They were more "critical," more "rational" man me veterans of me 1930s nationalist struggle; me search for a political shortcut predominated in their analyses. Slow, patient collective work seemed outdated to them. For them, the turning point of 1945, marked by me Setif massacre, served more as an accelerator man as a revelation, and precipitated me eclipse of me group built up around Messali Hadj in me interwar period. Hadj, who had been me impetus behind me first pro-independence organizations, was still me true charismatic leader of me national Algerian movement (Stora 1986). He was blind to me emergence of people no longer believing in classic political action (strikes, petitions, demonstrations). The "activists" in his party recommended recourse to armed struggle to escape me colonial impasse.

Reforms and Repression

"Algeria has been French for a long time. Therefore, secession is inconceivable." So asserted Premier Pierre Mendes-France on November 13 before the National Assembly. Minister of the Interior Francois Mitterrand added: "My policy will be defined by these three words: will, steadfastness, presence." As for the political bureau of the PCF, it declared on November 9 "that it could not approve of the recourse to individual acts likely to play into the hands of the colonialists, if, in fact, they were not fomented by them." Nevertheless, Communist militants, particularly in the Aures, joined the underground forces of November. Trotskyists and anarchist militants, very much in the minority, were the only ones in France to pronounce themselves resolutely in favor of Algerian independence.

How was it possible to believe, in that autumn of 1954, that this was a mere flare-up of violent crime, of isolated individual acts? The governor of Algeria, Roger Leonard in Algiers, and Jean Vaujour, the director of Surete (the criminal investigation bureau), had warned the government of the imminence of an insurrection. On November 20, 1954, Tunisia had its right to internal autonomy recognized. Contacts had already been made to re- turn the sultan of Morocco to his throne. The Arab, world was under the influence of the Nasserian revolution. The decisiveness of the official declarations concealed only poorly the tremors that were shaking the colonial empire. But, as far as Algeria was concerned, no one as yet in the French political class imagined any possibility of independence. The French government proved to be very steadfast in its repressive will. On November 5, 1954, the main pro-independence organization, the MTLD, was dissolved, its leaders ar- rested, and hundreds of militants forced to go underground. Most went on to swell the ranks of the first guerrilla groups. Military reinforcements were sent to Algeria. On February 2, 1955, in the Chamber, Francois Mitterrand declared:

Before the government was formed, that is, before mid-June 1954, there were 49,000 men in Algeria, including three companies of state security police (CRS). Before November 1, that is, in the first phase when, under the premier's authority, I was responsible for the Algerian affair, 75,000 men were sent as reinforcements. After November 1,26,000 were sent to Algeria, not including the goums trained on site. The figure today is 83,400 men. It is therefore 60 percent higher than what the government found in Algeria when it came to power.

On January 15, 1955, the main leader of the FLN in Constantinois, Didouche Mourad, was killed during a skirmish with the French army. A month later, on February II, the FLN leader in the Aures, Mostefa Ben Boulald, was arrested. But the sending of reinforcements and the military operations were accompanied by deep reforms. In January 1955, the government elaborated a program for Algeria:

-the creation in Algiers of a school of administration to give Muslim Algerians access to posts of responsibility in the public sector: of two thousand employees in the general government of Algeria, eight were Muslims; only 15 percent of Muslim children attended school; there was one European student for every 227 European residents of Algeria and one Muslim student for every 15,342 Muslim residents;
-a reduction of the gap between Algerian and European salaries: the gross income of the European in Algeria was twenty-eight times that of the Muslim;
-the initiation of major public works projects: entire zones had no roads, city hall offices, or post offices;
-the recognition of the state of economic poverty of many regions of Algeria and the difficulties caused by very strong demographic pressure: there were 850,000 under- or unemployed for an active population of 2,300,000 potential wage earners.


This program was little discussed, and for good reason. On February 5, 1955, the government of Pierre Mendes-France was overthrown. At five o'clock in the morning, at the end of a debate on North Africa, the result of the vote came in. By a margin of 319 to 273, the deputies delivered a no- confidence vote to the government. The right, the centrists, and the Communists applauded. The Catholics in the Mouvement Republicain Populaire, or MRP (popular Republican Movement, a centrist party) participated in that downfall, an attitude that the weekly Timoignage Chritien did not understand, judging that "we have concluded seven months marked by unquestionable innovation" (February 4, 1955).

Jacques Soustelle went to Algiers the day after the fall of the Mendes cabinet, which was replaced by that of Edgar Faure on February 11. The new governor of Algeria, an ethnologist and a Gaullist, had a justified reputation as an open, liberal man. He had the courage to include in his cabinet Major Vincent Monteil, a great Arabist, and the ethnologist Gennaine Tillion, a specialist on the Aures. Jacques Soustelle was poorly received by those in charge in Algiers. This Cevennes native of Protestant origin was baptized "Ben Soussan" [the implication was that he was Jewish-trans.) Was every- thing still possible in Algeria, even though the FLN had officially been recognized at the Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations in April? Jacques Soustelle met with the leaders of the ulama (religious reformists) and with Ferhat Abbas, who had his movement (founded in 1946), the Union Democratique du Manifeste Algerien or UDMA (Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto), participate in the district elections of April 1955.

Until mid-1955, Soustelle labored to understand the discontent of the Muslim population. His trips to the Aures and Kabylia revealed to him the under-administration of the regions agitated by Algerian nationalism, especially the Aures, and the futility of the military deployments, which en- circled nothing more than a vacuum. In March 1955, he asked the government for the right to adapt legislation to the conditions of that war, which still did not dare speak its name. On March 31, 1955, the National Assembly voted in a state of emergency that strengthened the powers of the army in the limited zone of the Aures, and authorized the displacement of "contaminated" populations to "settlement camps." A first camp opened in Khenchela, where one hundred and sixty people were confined. On May 19, the government recalled several annual contingents of soldiers. The army launched major sweeping operations in the second half of 1955. But these measures did not weaken the "rebellion." The authority of the FLN was demonstrated by the district elections in April: the abstention order it issued was followed by 60 percent of the voting population in Constantinois.

Jacques Soustelle promised "integration" and reforms. It was too late: everything fell apart on August 20, 1955, the anniversary of the deposing of the sultan of Morocco. The "phony war" ended, and the Algerian War began in earnest.

[Jedburgh]

Your source doesn't even mention the mini-revolt in Setif in '45. 5 days of killing Europeans (103 dead) by local Muslims - followed by a far bloodier reprisal which resulted in around 5,000 Muslims killed. Those events shaped the future path of nearly every one of the key leaders of the resistance that was to emerge in the '50s.

However, why don't you just post the links and initiate a discussion on the Algerian War and its relevance in today's operational environment? This has the potential to be one of the better topics on the board. Is it assumed that people here are too dull or stupid or simply lack the capability to open a web-page on their own, read and be able to discuss operational matters? Or should I just shutup because this is a "read-only" forum?

Algeria offers a lot of potential for study in insurgency. Not just simple counter-insurgent tactics, but intelligence ops in both urban and rural environments, use of armed local nationals - both as conventional armed adjuncts and armed bands outside the authority of the normal chain-of-command, the Battle of Algiers itself offers much, as does the French efforts to stop cross-border penetration by FLN elements as well as French attempts to stop, or at least deter, international arms dealers from supplying the FLN.

On the political level, you have the multiple factions - beyond just simple Arab and Kabyle - of the insurgents, as well as loyalists among the indig. Then the factions among the colonials themselves, the pied noirs, petit blancs and the grand colons. And the there's the French Army.

This forum has a lot of potential. But most of what I see here is nothing but links or cut-and-paste.

[Red]

Great post,Jedburgi have done very little reading about the Algerian war but i am greatly facinated by the whole event and the reported role of Israeli intelligence in the whole thing

[Yosy]

However, why don't you just post the links and initiate a discussion on the Algerian War and its relevance in today's operational environment? This has the potential to be one of the better topics on the board. Is it assumed that people here are too dull or stupid or simply lack the capability to open a web-page on their own, read and be able to discuss operational matters? Or should I just shutup because this is a "read-only" forum?


Don't be lazy - do that yourself. I already participated in discussions about the Algerian conflict in here. That doesn't mean I wouldn't do it again.

And save your critics for when I'm done, OK?

Chapter 2, The Open War (August 1955-December 1956)

The Uprising of August 20,1955

On August 20, 1955, thousands of Algerian peasants revolted and rushed to attack cities in North Constantinois within the quadrilateral formed by Collo, Philippeville, Constantine, and Guelma. The initiative behind that large-scale action fell to Zighoud Youcef, Didouche Mourad's successor at the head of the FLN's North Constantinois zone, and on his assistant, Lakhdar Ben Tobbal. On that day, the FLN leaders intended to mark the second anniversary of the deposing of Sidi Mohammed Ben Youcef, sultan of Morocco, by the French. The war assumed its true face in Constantinois, where the coexistence of communities had always been tenser than in the rest of Algeria. Ten years after the "events" of Setif and Guelma in May 1945, an identical outburst of violence recurred, followed by an excessive and indiscriminate repression. At about noon several thousand fellahs (peasants, agricultural workers) moved into about thirty cities and villages. They were weakly organized by a few uniformed soldiers of the Armee de Liberation Nationale, or ALN (National Liberation Army, the armed branch of the FLN), and they attacked police stations, the gendarmerie, and various public buildings. These peasants were agitated: a rumor of an Egyptian landing in Collo circulated. Many French people, but also Muslims, were murdered with axes, billhooks, picks, or knives. Political figures were attacked, including SaId Cherif, UDMA delegate to the Algerian assembly, and Abbas Alaoua, Ferhat Abbas's nephew, who was murdered in his pharmacy in Constantine. The death toll of the riots came to 123, including 71 in the European population.

The repression was terrible. The army set to work and, as in May 1945, private militias were formed. The official death toll was fixed at 1,273. After an investigation, the FLN put forward the figure of 12,000 victims, which has never been disproved. On August 20, 1955, the myth of "peacekeeping operations" in Algeria came to an end. France was going to war, and it recalled sixty thousand reservists. Jacques Soustelle, governor-general of Algeria, overwhelmed by the spectacle of mutilated European cadavers in Philippeville, now gave the army carte blanche. The time for reforms was past. On September 30, 1955, the "Algerian question" was on the UN's agenda. The pro-independence Algerians, via the August 20 uprising, succeeded in attracting worldwide attention to Algeria. The conflict entered its phase of internationalization.

In face of the developing nationalist insurrection in Algeria, the French government hastened to settle matters for the two French protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco. It negotiated with the nationalist leaders Habib Bourguiba and Mohamed \7; whom its predecessors had exiled and imprisoned; it granted internal sovereignty to Tunisia (independence would become effective in March 1956) and outright independence to Morocco in November 1955.

The Soldiers' Movement

After August 20, 1955, the repression in Algeria openly took on the look and dimensions of a true war. The battalions of security police, gendarmes, legionnaires, and paratroopers who were already in Algeria were supplemented by more conscripts. On August 24, 1955, 60,000 young soldiers who had recently been liberated were "recalled" to service, and on August 30 the government decreed that 180,000 "dischargeable" soldiers would re- main in the military.
Very quickly, those who were called back tried to oppose these measures, sometimes with the support of their families and the general population. On September I, at the Gare de l'Est in Paris, two thousand young people re- fused to board the trains, shouting "Civilian life!" "No war in Algeria!" and "Morocco for the Moroccans!" On September 2, six hundred of the "re- called" in the air force demonstrated at the Gare de Lyons. Similar events were repeated in Brives, Perpignan, and Bordeaux. The contingent demonstrated to shouts of "The civilians are on our side!" But, in fact, that soldiers' movement, which did not find support among the masses of "civilians," quickly ran out of steam because of individual lassitude and also a lack of political prospects. The organizations and major parties proved to be more preoccupied with the tumult of political life within France. On November 29, by a margin of318 to 218, the Assembly passed a vote of no-confidence directed at Edgar Faure's government, thus setting in motion its dissolution. Legislative elections were set for January 2, 1956.

The Election and "The Day of Tomatoes"

Despite the dissolution of the Chamber, Jacques Soustelle continued the state of emergency. The government decided to postpone the elections in Algeria. The elected officials in Ferhat Abbas's Union Democratique du Manifeste Algerien decided to resign from the Algerian assembly, in the footsteps of the sixty-one Muslim elected officials who, on September 26, 1955, had opposed the integration policy championed by Soustelle. On December 20, 1955, L 'Express reproduced photographs taken in August depicting the execution of an Algerian "rebel" by an auxiliary gendarme. The electoral campaign proceeded against the background of the Algerian tragedy, and the left called for "peace in Algeria." The Socialists and Radicals formed a Front Republicain, which won the election on January 2, 1956. The major event of these legislative elections was the making of inroads by Pierre Poujade's movement, which won 52 of the 623 seats, including one for Jean- Marie Le Pen. Pierre Poujade's movement, the Union de Defense des Commercants et Artisans, or UDCA (Defense Union of Tradespeople and Artisans), campaigned against the "crooks" in the government and against the tax system. The Communists won 50 seats.

On February 1, the National Assembly invested the new government. Guy Mollet became premier, and General Georges Catroux, minister resident in Algeria. Jacques Soustelle, who had received such a poor welcome upon his arrival in Algiers, left a city in frenzy on February 2, 1956. More than 100,000 people, most of them Europeans, noisily demon- strated their affection, and stood in the path of the armored car that was trying to make its way to the port: "Don't go! Mendes in the Aures! Catroux in the sea!" Old general Catroux, a liberal, would never reach the Summer Palace in Algiers. On February 6, a demonstration of "ultras," proponents of French Algeria, shouted down the government's policy; various projectiles hit Guy Mollet. This event would become known to posterity under the name of "the day of tomatoes." The premier, still neutral, abandoned his policy, seeking peace in Algeria: the Republic had capitulated in the face of a few projectiles thrown onto this Glieres plateau of Algiers, which had become the cauldron of Algerian rage. Pierre Mendes-France resigned his post as state minister. The Socialist government was about to plunge into war.

The "Special Powers"

The extremist pieds noirs and the army demanded an increase in the number of soldiers, already 190,000 strong in February 1956, and the addition of helicopters to support the partitioning of the "bled." Robert Lacoste, former Resistance fighter and member of the SFIO, named minister resident in Algeria by Guy Mollet on February 9, 1956, introduced a legislative bill in the National Assembly, "authorizing the government to set in place a program of economic expansion, social progress, and administrative reform in Algeria, and enabling it to take all exceptional measures in view of reestablishing order, protecting persons and property, and safe- guarding the territory."

Via the decrees of March and April 1956, which would allow increased military action and the recall of reservists, Algeria was divided into three zones (a zone of operation, a pacification zone, and a forbidden zone), in which three specific army corps would move. In the zone of operation, the objective would be to "crush the rebels." In the pacification zones, the "protection" of European and Muslim populations was foreseen, with the army struggling against the deficiencies of the administration. The forbidden zones were to be evacuated, and the population assembled in "settlement camps" and placed under the control of the army.

On March 12, the Parliament (by a margin of 455 to 76) overwhelmingly passed that law on special powers which, among other things, suspended most of the guarantees of individual liberties in Algeria. The PCF voted for the law. The "special powers" constituted the real turning point in a war that France had decided to wage totally.

On April11, the recall of the reservists was decreed. Tens of thousands of soldiers crossed the Mediterranean. Prior to that application of the law, the directors of the journal Les Temps Modernes realized where it would lead and said so. "The left. for once unanimous, has voted for 'special powers,' powers perfectly useless for negotiation but indispensable for the continuation and escalation of the war. This vote is scandalous and runs the risk of being irreparable." It would in fact be so.

On March 16, 1956, four days after the vote on special powers, the first FLN attacks struck Algiers. Robert Lacoste imposed a curfew on the city, continuously crisscrossed by his patrols. In France, a few final spontaneous demonstrations took shape around train stations and barracks, against "the departure of the recalled reservists." Public opinion balked at the extension of military service to twenty-eight months. In Algeria, "the bled" continued to "rot, " and terrorism took root nearly everywhere. Oran was hit by FLN strikes in February, Algiers by similar strikes in May. The dissemination of the French troops and their mediocre training made them vulnerable to am- bushes: in Palestro, on May 19, twenty young recalled reservists from Paris fell during an attack by members of the "Ali Khodja" ALN commando, assisted by the general population. Five days later the sole survivor was rescued by paratroopers.

In July and September of 1956, discreet negotiations opened between the delegates of the FLN (M'Hamed Yazid and Abderrahmane Kiouane) and of the SFIO (pierre Commun) in Belgrade and Rome. The SFIO urged Guy Mollet to obtain a pause in the fighting through the intervention of the sultan of Morocco and of Habib Bourguiba, president of Tunisia, which had won its independence on March 20, 1956. Hocine Ait Ahmed, Mohamed Boudiaf, Ahmed Ben Bella, and Mohammed Khider discussed these prospects in Rabat on October 21, and flew off to Tunis the next day. But the Moroccan DC-3 carrying them was intercepted by the French air force and forced to land in Algiers. Robert Lacoste and the military, who did not miss that opportunity to "root out the rebellion," made it impossible for Guy Mollet to pursue the beginnings of a negotiation. The European population of Algiers, which had endured the nightmare of explosions in bars frequented by its young people, noisily demonstrated its confidence in Robert Lacoste, who was congratulated for his energy. But, in Algeria and the metropolis, attention was soon diverted from the fate of Ben Bella and his companions (they would remain incarcerated until the end of the war) by the Suez expedition on November 5 and 6, 1956.

Guy Mollet, haunted by the memory of the capitulation of Munich in 1938, and comparing Nasser to a "new Hitler," launched the foolhardy military expedition of Port Said. The Franco-British operation aimed to wrest the Suez Canal from the control of Egypt, which had nationalized the company in July. In the minds of the French general staff, the operation would serve to take down Nasser, who was considered the most active supporter of the Algerian insurrection. But the tactical success, acquired with the cooperation of the Israelis, who had attacked to the east, was transformed into a political rout: the Americans and the Russians made the troops depart again on November 15, and the UN put the Algerian question on its agenda.

The FLN took advantage of these events to make its presence known in the countryside and in the cities. In the late part of 1956, the Algerian War took a nasty turn. The army had increased in size from 54,000 to 350,000 men within two years. Several classes had to be recalled, and the length of military service was extended to nearly thirty months. The repression pushed thousands of young Algerians toward the guerrilla forces (students in particular, who organized a strike in March 1956). The French sector forces combed the territory with little zeal. The paratroopers and the Legion, constantly on call, suffered heavy losses. In late 1956, the ALN had tens of thousands of djounouds (warriors) in its ranks. Things were deteriorating everywhere. Certain regions represented real sanctuaries for the FLN. Most of the Muslim elected officials, including Ferhat Abbas, joined the camp of Algerian nationalism.

Since autumn, Robert Lacoste had been calling for a new commander in chief. On November 15, 1956, Guy Mollet installed General Raoul Salan in place of General Henri Lorillot, who had been unable to respond to the guerrilla war, despite the reinforcements landing each month in Algeria. The arrival of Raoul Salan, a veteran of Indochina and a "strategist" of subversive war, opened a new chapter in the Algerian War, especially since the FLN had decided to change its field of operation: in January 1957, it took the war to the heart of Algiers, making repeated attacks and issuing the order for a general strike.

[Jedburgh]

And save your critics for when I'm done, OK?
Look bucko, if I or anyone else has a valid criticism, expect it to be posted at the appropriate point in the cut-and-pasting of your 9 chapters copped from the U San Fran Professor's page. Don't be such a weak sister. The critique regarding the fact that your first intro post and Chapter 1 neglected to mention Setif '45 and its significant influence upon key leaders and members of the resistance is quite valid, as anyone with any knowledge of the conflict would admit.

As regards the criticism regarding cut-and-paste posting with no real analysis, debate or critique - I stand by my statement.

BTW, here's the link to the University of San Francisco's Professor Webber-created 9 Chapter surface treatment of the war that you are cut-and-pasting at such length: Algerian War Reading (http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/webberm/algeria.htm)

[Yosy]

^^^^ if you want a discussion, start a new thread.

Chapter 3, The Cruel War (1957)

The "Battle of Algiers"

On December 27, 1956, Amedee Froger, president of the federation of mayors of Algeria and a virulent spokesman for the minor colons, was murdered in Algiers. The next day his funeral occasioned truly brutal ratonnades (Arab-bashings), which caused several Muslim casualties. Tension was extreme between the Europeans and the Muslim Algerians. Robert Lacoste's general government decided to react. On the basis of the "special powers" passed in March 1956, he entrusted the "pacification" of Algiers to General Jacques Massu, commander of the Tenth Paratroopers' Division.

On January 7, 1957, eight thousand paratroopers moved into the city, charged with a policing mission. The "battle of Algiers" had begun. On January 9 and 10, two explosions caused panic in two stadiums in Algiers. But the horror reached its peak on January 26. Within a few minutes of each other, two charges exploded, the first in the bar L'Otomatic, the second in the cafe Le Coq Hardi, in the very center of Algiers. Two Muslim Algerians were lynched by an agitated European mob. On January 28, to coincide with the United Nations debates, the FLN launched an order for an eight- day general strike. The army broke the strike. At every moment and at every location, helicopters landed on the terraces of the Casbah. The city was divided into sectors, and the Muslim neighborhoods were isolated behind barbed wire, under searchlights. General Massu, endowed with policing powers over the city, had the responsibility of restoring order, and broke apart the FLN's "autonomous zone of Algiers" (ZAA) which was located primarily in the Casbah and headed by Yacef Saadi. The FLN set up a true organization estimated at five thousand militants. Terrorism served to justify recourse to every means possible. Massu's men made massive arrests, systematically took down names, and, in the "transit and sorting centers" located on the periphery of the city, practiced torture. The leader of the FLN, Larbi Ben M'Hidi, was arrested on February 17, and subsequently was said to have "committed suicide." The "very exhaustive" interrogations produced results.

It was truly "blood and ****," as Colonel Marcel Bigeard said, a horrendous battle, during which bombs blew dozens of European victims to pieces, while paratroopers dismantled the networks by uncovering their hierarchy, discovered caches, and flushed out the FLN leaders installed in the city. Their means? Electrodes (known as gigene, a slang term for generator), dunkings in bathtubs, beatings. Some of the torturers were sadists, to be sure. But many officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers would live with that nightmare for the rest of their lives. The number of attacks perpetrated fell from 112 in January to 39 in February, then to 29 in March. The FLN's command center, run by Abbane Ramdane, was forced to leave the capital. Massu had a first victory.
On March 28, 1957, General Paris de Bollardiere asked to be relieved of his duties. He could not allow the use of torture, which he had experienced and fought against during the German Occupation. The chaplain of the Tenth Paratroopers' Division responded by declaring: "One cannot fight against revolutionary war except with methods of clandestine action." General Paris de Bollardiere was sentenced to sixty days in prison on April 15, 1957.

In early June the attacks resumed. On June 3, a bomb went off near a bus stop; on June 9, the dance hall of a casino was targeted, causing 8 deaths and 92 injuries. The repression began again, aided this time by a network of "reformed" militants (called the "overalls"), who, under the leadership of Captain Uger, infiltrated the FLN and brought down many leaders. Yacef Saadi was arrested on September 24, 1957. His assistant, Ali La Pointe, finding himself surrounded, committed suicide in a cache to avoid arrest. The "battle of Algiers" was over. The European population rediscovered the pleasures of the beach and the restaurants, and worshiped its paratroopers. That idyll would continue on May 13, 1958.

The FLN networks had been destroyed, thousands of Algerians had been arrested or "disappeared." But that military victory was accompanied by a grave moral crisis. On September 12, 1957, Paul Teitgen, secretary general of the Algiers police, resigned in protest against the practices of General Massu and the paratroopers. He put forward the figure of 3,024 disappeared. The "question" of torture was about to divide France.

The Question of Torture

Torture, employed as an ordinary procedure of "pacification" during the "battle of Algiers," was certainly the great scandal of these Algerian years (Vidal-Naquet 1975).

As early as January 15, 1955, the writer Francois Mauriac had published an article in L 'Express entitled "The Question." At the same time, the journalist Claude Bourdet also denounced what he called "Your Algerian Gestapo" in France-Obseruateur. On March 2, 1955, Roger Willaume, an inspector general in the administration, remitted a report to Jacques Soustelle, governor-general of Algeria, which made it very clear that torture was commonly practiced on "suspects." On December 13, 1955, Premier Edgar Faure received a report prepared by Jean Mairey, director of Surete Nationale, that reached the same conclusion. Torture was being used by the "ditachement opirationnnel de protection", or DOP (protective operation detail), special units of the army charged with "exhaustive" interrogations.

Beginning in mid-February 1957, the weekly Timoignage Chritien published the "Jean Muller dossier," by a recalled reservist in Algeria: "We are far removed from the pacification for which we were supposedly called; we are desperate to see how low human nature can stoop, and to see the French use procedures stemming from Nazi barbarism." In March 1957, a few recalled reservists put out a brochure, Des rappelis timoignent (Recalled reservists bear witness) under the aegis of the Comite de Resistance Spirituelle (Committee of Spiritual Resistance). In it, there are accounts such as this: "I was thinking of the kid, who I imagined terrorized at the bottom of the jeep trailer, where he had been shut up at night. Yet it was the kid they were torturing." In April, the journal Esprit published the wrenching account by Robert Bonnaud, "The Peace of the Nementchas": "If France's honor can go along with these acts of torture, then France is a country without honor."

In September 1957, Paul Teitgen resigned his post as secretary general of the police in Algiers. He wrote: "In visiting the settlement centers, I recognized on certain detainees the deep marks of abuse or torture that I personally endured fourteen years ago in the basement of the Gestapo in Nancy." In November 1957, at the initiative of the mathematician Laurent Schwartz and the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the Comite Maurice-Audin was formed, named after a young mathematician who disappeared after being abducted by paratroopers and tortured. In January 1958, Henri Alleg's La question appeared, which troubled consciences and publicly revealed the torture. So began the "affair" that deeply divided public opinion, the Church, families, and the parties: Why did the French army practice large-scale torture? Many thought that torture could become an institution, first of the police, and then of the military.

The publication in newspapers and journals (L'Humaniti, Les Temps Modernes, Esprit, Viriti Pour) of works such as the Catholic writer Pierre- Henri Simon's Contre la torture (Against torture) got intellectuals involved; they soon formed into networks that fought against disinformation and human rights violations. Communist militants, writers, the Catholic intellectuals Francois Mauriac, Andre Mandouze, Pierre-Henri Simon, and Andre Frossard, and priests proved particularly active in the circulation of the war "secrets." Some belonged to the Mission de France, set up in Pontigny, Yonne, in August 1954, under the supervision of cardinal Lienart.

Despite the censorship and the shroud of secrecy covering Algeria, the French public gradually discovered the true nature of a conflict that, to be sure, no longer had anything to do with a mere "peacekeeping mission."

Censorship, Prisons, Camps

The Algerian war brought about major restrictions on the freedom of the press, of publication, and of visual images. Censorship was set in place on a large scale. The law of April 13, 1955, declaring "the state of emergency," allowed administrative authorities, the minister of the interior, the general government, and the prefects to "take all measures to ensure control of the press and of publications of all kinds, as well as radio transmissions, showings of films, and theatrical performances" (article II of the law of April 3, 1955, declared applicable by that law). The decree of March 17, 1956, within the framework of the "special powers," repeated a similar formula, extended to "every means of expression." Printed texts could be seized by the administration and the courts, or subject to police measures or additional penalties, as an attack on state security.

The many newspapers and books seized by the prefects came about by virtue of article 10 of the criminal investigation code, which became article 30 of the penal procedures code. That article allowed the prefect to temporarily seize books or periodicals that contained a press violation, as stipulated by the law of July 29, 1881, if it also constituted "an attack on state security." In its section on crimes and misdemeanors committed via the press, the law of July 28, 1881, restricted freedom of opinion by repressing incitement to crimes and misdemeanors against the body politic. Article 25 of that law, used many times during the Algerian War, "represses the incitement of military personnel to disobedience, even when it remains without effect." A decision of April 27, 1961, defined the grounds that could justify a ban: support of an act of subversion directed against the authorities or laws of the Republic, or the dissemination of secret information, military or administrative.

Under the Fourth Republic, certain newspapers, such as L'express, France-Observateu7; L'Humanite, Le Canard Enchame, La Verite des Travai//eurs, and Le Libertaire were particularly targeted. Nearly thirty works from the publishers Jerome Lindon and Francois Maspero would be seized under the Fifth Republic, between 1958 and 1962.

As of 1955, the police and the army championed house arrest for Algerian nationalist militants. Detention camps were established in Algeria by virtue of the law of March 16, 1956. Tens of thousands of Algerians were put into camps without due process, in Bossuet, Saint-Leu, and Lambessa.

The law of July 26, 1957, extended to France the provisions set out in the so-called special powers law. It stipulated the possibility of restricting to a detention center, in places located within the metropolis, any person convicted in application of the "laws on battle squads or private militias." Only one mode of application was envisioned for the detention thus set in place: internment in a guarded residence center. Between 1956 and 1959, then, four detention centers under guard were gradually established: Mounnelon-Vadenay (Marne), Saint-Maurice-l' Ardoise (Gard), Thol (Ain), and Larzac (Aveyron). The militants brought to these centers, after their sentences had been served, were those considered by the police to be "most active in the rebellion, whose return to freedom, that is, to separatist plots, poses a serious danger." The optimal use of these legislative provisions made it possible to obtain, within two years, the signing of 6,707 detention orders, of which 1,860 were executed.

The Fourth Republic was also a time of massive trials and death sentences. Ahmed Zabana, judged by the armed forces tribunal in Algiers, was the first to be sentenced to death; he was executed in the Barberousse Prison on June 19, 1956.

The Battles of the French Army

The bazooka attack committed on January 16, 1957, against Salan's office seems to have been separate from the "battle of Algiers": supposedly, the goal of the plot was to eliminate a general who was suspected of liberalism. In fact, Salan managed to straighten out the military situation. As it happened, in the bled, the combat methods of Colonel Jeanpierre's legionnaires, Bigeard's paratroopers, and others, paid off. The "rebels" bringing armaments from Tunisia and Morocco were intercepted and pursued into the interior of the sectors patrolled by conventional regiments. Helicopters and intelligence became the instruments of the troops, who were freed from policing Algiers in early summer 1957.

Despite a noticeable increase in its losses, the ALN was strengthened, than to the weapons and reinforcements that, in spite of everything, it received from Morocco and especially Tunisia, where it sent its recruits to be trained and armed. To isolate Algeria from these countries, Minister of Defense Andre Morice (a member of the Bourges-Maunoury government from June to September 1957) decided to build, behind the border lines, network of electrified and mined barbed wire (called the barrages or the "Morice Line"). In the desert zones, these were supplemented by batteries of cannons that would fire automatically when set off by radar. These obstacles could be breached, but as soon as they were, the break in the electrical current would send a signal to the military forces that someone had gone through.

In late May 1957, a very bitter skirmish occurred in wilaya IV between Bigeard's paratroopers and five hundred "fellaghas" (the name given the peasant insurrection movement in Tunisia) led by Azzedine, who escaped; ninety-six "rebels" were killed. At the same time, Salan undertook "social" pacification and dispatched SAS (special administrative section) officers to the bled: these men were paid to promote literacy and provide medical assistance, which also served as counterpropaganda and intelligence. In the rural areas, the relocation of the evacuated populations from the "forbidden zones" and the SAS actions had a negative effect on the FLN-ALN's recruitment, supply operations, and intercommunications. The recruitment of harkis and other auxiliaries from the peasantry resistant to the authority of the insurgent leaders, and from former "rebels," facilitated the actions of the military forces (in 1962, a report sent to the UN estimated the number of Muslims who fought in the auxiliary units or in self-defense groups at 263,000).

In early 1958, the French command judged that the war was virtually won. Minister Resident Robert Lacoste kept repeating victory would come to the one who held out for "the last quarter hour." That entailed "forgetting" the profound political and moral crisis permeating the Fourth Republic in 1957. In addition, the FLN leadership, installed outside the country, still hoped to win by combining an offensive of its troops from Tunisia and Morocco with diplomatic pressure on the UN, as a way to internationalize the conflict with an Algerian "Dien Bien Phu."

Crises in the Republic

In 1957, the conflict intensified throughout Algeria, outside the large cities. Soldiers of the contingent were now engaged in war, while in the metropolis more and more people were speaking out against torture. The UN demanded that France apply a "peaceful, democratic, and fair" solution to the Algerian problem. The American senator John F. Kennedy publicly declared himself in favor of this approach on July 2, 1957. In Paris, the Guy Mollet government, whose budget was reeling under the weight of heavy expenses incurred by the "peacekeeping operation" in Algeria, was overthrown on May 28, 1957. The cabinet of Maurice Bourges-Maunoury succeeded it. It decided to focus on the Sahara, where oil had been discovered, and asked Robert Lacoste, who was kept in his post, to prepare an outline law that would bring a "new Algeria" into being. The international repercussions of the Algerian affair were obsessing the parties in the Front Republicain and, by September 1957, the gap had widened between the politicians and the military, between the metropolis and the pieds noirs, and within the left itself. A large proportion of "democrats" and "leftists" in the Federation de I'Education Nationale, or FEN (National Education Federation), the Force Ouvriere, or FO (Workers' Power), and the Ligue des Droits des Hommes (Human Rights League), spoke of "the indigenous populations" and of "the territories," not of peoples and nations. Individual oppression was recognized, not national oppression. The republican left (which had come into existence during the Dreyfus affair) with its passion for universalism and the principles of 1789, opposed nationalism (French or Algerian) and religious circles. Logically, it rejected the proclamations of the Algerian nationalists, which were "marked by Islamic religiosity." At the same time, it could not understand why the republican principle of equality had never really been applied to Algeria and the colonies.

The Algerian affair, in fact, legitimated a republican reading of the FLN as a "symbol of justice"; but a different reading saw the organization as the conveyor of an "archaic nationalism to be transcended." The PCF also proved incapable of deciding between these two readings. That failure led to the involvement of a significant faction of young people in a radical Third World movement against "National Molletism" and the PCF, considered obstinately faithful to Moscow. The largest aid network to the FLN was run by Francis Jeanson, a philosopher and managing editor of the journal Les Temps Modernes, who, with his wife, Colette, had published L'AIgirie hors-/a loi (Outlaw Algeria) in 1955. Jeanson had long hoped for a burst of energy on the part of the French left, which the "people" had brought to power in 1956 under the Front Republicain label; he was weary of meetings, placards, and the pious motions of a left that "continued to put the brakes to a movement that it prided itself on promoting." Observing that "none of the people who spoke of putting an end to the war, which they themselves declared absurd, conceded that one might help French young people refuse to become mired in it, " and that "they were denouncing colonialism, but considered criminal any sort of practical solidarity with the colonized," he came to the logical conclusion: provide direct aid to the FLN.

During this time, the Socialist Robert Lacoste was attempting to escape the political impasse. He prepared an outline law that included a "single college," which would get rid of the voting inequality in the two colleges (one European vote was worth seven Algerian votes, according to the statute drafted in 1947). On September 13, this proposal for an outline law was adopted in the Council of Ministers. But it was in turn shouted down by the majority of Europeans. It did not even manage to convince the National Assembly: on September 30, 1957, Bourges-Maunoury was overthrown. It was not until the following November 6 that the assembly awarded its confidence to the new government of the Radical Felix Gaillard. The outline law on Algeria, greatly watered down to reduce the influence of Muslim elected officials, was finally passed on November 29, and its application postponed until the end of the war. Funds were allocated to build the electrified barriers on the borders of Morocco and Tunisia, the "Morice Line" (named after the short-lived minister of defense). Robert Lacoste remained resident minister in Algeria, but his authority was gone. General Salan now exercised vast prerogatives, and intended to win the war with his spirited colonels.

[Jedburgh]

^^^^ if you want a discussion, start a new thread.
:roll:
Ignorance is bliss.

[Yosy]

Chapter 4, The War of the Algerians (1954-1958)

November 1, 1954, the official date of the outbreak of the Algerian War, did not coincide with the imposition of a single leadership (the emergent FLN, for example) or with the collapse of all earlier political currents. As it turned out, the FLN was to structure and consolidate itself over two years, culminating in the Soummam Congress on August 20, 1956. In these two years, cadres were recruited and selected, the population trained, the idea of independence developed, channels established, and guerrilla warfare reinvented. But, above all, it took two long years to have the envied title of "authorized representative" recognized through the integration of all other currents into the FLN, with the exception of the proponents of the old nationalist leader Messali Hadj, who in December 1954 founded the Mouvement National Algerien (Stora 1985).

Differences among Nationalists

The dissolution of the MTLD by the Council of Ministers on November 4, 1954, led to the arrest of several hundred Algerian nationalist leaders and militants. Those who were not arrested had no choice: they had to go underground or join the guerrilla forces. The FLN took full advantage of the dissolution of the MTLD. It set structures in place to intercept the majority of disoriented Messalists and welcome them into the underground forces; they took possession of the stocks of weapons inherited from the O5, the paramilitary organization of the MTLD; and they initiated contact with the Tunisians and the Moroccans. A large number of immigrants joining the guerrilla forces were taken in hand by the FLN. But, in the first phase of the insurrection, it also suffered very cruel blows. On January 15 , 1955, Didouche Mourad, leader of Constantinois, died in battle; on February 11, Mostefa Ben Boulald, leader of the Aures, was arrested; on March 16, Rabah Bitat, who had organized the urban guerrilla war in Algiers, was also arrested.

Under these conditions of very active repression (between November 1954 and April 1955), efforts at reconciliation took place between "activists" (the members of the MTLD who had perpetrated the events of November 1, 1954), "centralists" (the majority of the former members of the central committee of the MTLD), and "Messalists" (the followers of Messali Hadj). During this period, the FLN was still seeking its identity, assessing its strength. In Algiers, in Cairo, and among the guerrilla forces, contacts and efforts at reconciliation took place between "Messalists" and "Frontists" (supporters of the FLN). That did not fail to promote confusion within the immigrant community in France, and in Algeria. To be sure, the grass-roots nationalist militants had to expend a great deal of effort disentangling the maze of triangular relationships among all the parties involved (Messalists, CRUA, centralists) and understanding the disputes, which were Byzantine in their view, in the period preceding and immediately following the insurrection of November 1, 1954.

Confusion was also at its height among the guerrilla forces. All currents, though not acting in concert, accepted the designation" ALN" as the sole military structure. A large portion of Messalist militants decided on their own to resort to weapons as soon as the November 1 operations became known. In certain regions of Algeria, particularly the Aures and Kabylia, armed groups formed independent of the existing leadership. They were "taken in hand" after the fact. Animated simply by patriotic desire, some were familiar with the FLN, while others embraced Messali. On November 1, 1954, the pamphlets clearly distinguished between the FLN, the movement's political organization, and the ALN, a military organization. But in the Aures, for example, the entire political side answered to the authority of Chihani Bachir, Ben Boulald's second in command. The Aures zone leaders did not see the usefulness of the distinction. They believed it was enough to proclaim open revolution and to train militants. In Kabylia, and especially in the Bowra region, the militants fought under the name" Armee de Liberation Nationale," which tended to create ambiguity regarding the designation "ALN," shared by the FLN and the MNA. Things came to a head politically in 1955.

The FLN-MNA War

In early 1955, the "activists" of the former MTLD, who had founded the FLN, managed to pull the members of the "centralist" current along with them. Conversely, the Messalists, heirs to a long political tradition, and who did not believe exclusively in military action to achieve independence, rejected the activist aims, which they judged simplistic. For Messali Hadj, formed within the French left, the activists were the victims of an "infantile disease." The two organizations, the FLN and the MNA, were about to engage in violent confrontations.

On June 1, 1955, the murder of Saifi, an old PPA militant, whose hotel and restaurant on rue Aumaire, in the third arrondissement of Paris, harbored illegal aliens, precipitated the confrontation. In a pamphlet issued in late November 1955, Abbane Ramdane, assistant to Krim Belkacem and leader of the FLN in Algiers, called Messali Hadj "a shame-faced old man who holds the Angouleme front, at the head of an army of police officers, which assures his protection against the anger of the people." After various insults and accusations exchanged via pamphlets, weapons took the place of words. On December 10, 1955, in Algiers, Salah Bouchafa and Mustapha Fettal, FLN militants, executed Sadek Rihani, the leader of the MNA in Algiers. The test of strength had begun. For both organizations, the nature of the future independent Algerian society was not at issue. The violent rivalry took place at a different level: who ought to be, who could be, the exclusive representative of the Algerian people?

From 1955 to 1962, the "shock commandos" of the FLN and the MNA waged a long, cruel battle using every means possible: traps, betrayal, infiltration, and executions to serve as an example, all of them sowing fear. In Algeria, this internecine struggle was exemplified, in May 1957, by the FLN's bloody massacre of 374 villagers in Melouza, who were suspected of Messalist sympathies. The massacre spurred the MNA fighters, especially those of Mohammed Bellounis, to immediately join the French army. On March 20, 1962, the newspaper Le Monde published statistics on the scope of the confrontation between nationalists in France (the FLN versus the MNA): more than twelve thousand assaults, four thousand deaths, and more than nine thousand injuries. In Algeria itself, the toll of that civil war was very heavy: six thousand dead and fourteen thousand wounded. In total, in France and in Algeria, the number of victims rose to nearly ten thousand dead and twenty-five thousand wounded in the two camps.

The FLN would emerge victorious in this war within a war. But thousands of militants who had been trained for modem political life in the immigration movement in France, in particular, were killed in the process, and would be cruelly absent from the leadership of an Algeria at war, and then of an independent Algeria.

Converts to the FLN, the Soummam Congress

In 1955 and 1956, the FLN increased contacts and discussions with the other Algerian components. All the same, aware of the "bankruptcy" of the earlier parties, it expected them simply to dissolve and their members to join the FLN in a purely individual capacity. Following in the footsteps of the "centralists" (Ben Youssef Ben Khedda, Saad Dhalab, M'Hamed Yazid, and Hocine Lahouel), Ferhat Abbas's UDMA rallied behind the FLN in late 1955.

The FLN was to obtain this massive conversion of the "old elites," so avidly desired, from another organization, the ulama (a religious reformist movement that championed the rebirth of Islamic identity in Algeria). That religious organization, worried about its lack of control over the events, went over to the FLN camp during its conference on January 7, 1956, and glorified the "resistance to colonialism." Then there was the case of the Parti Communiste Algerien, or PCA (Algerian Communist Party). In May and June 1956, Ben Khedda and Abbane Ramdane, representing the FLN, and Bachir Hadj Ali and Sadek Hadjeres, representing the PCA, began protracted discussions. On July 1, 1956, the Algerian Communists-were integrated into the ALN.

The Soummam Congress, which was held on August 20, 1956, made official "the bankruptcy of the former political organizations of the old par- ties," and noted that the "grass-roots militants" had rallied behind the FLN, and that the UDMA and the ulama had been dissolved. With this congress, held in the Soummam Valley in Kabylia, the "Algerian revolution" changed its aspect. The long (twenty-day) debates culminated in a well-defined program, the structuring of the FLN-ALN, and the affirmation of the primacy of political over military action and of the domestic scene over the exterior (feguia 1984).

Initially planned for July 31 in the region of the Bibane, the congress did not open until August 20 in a forester's cottage close to the village of Igbal, on the western slope of the Soummam. Sixteen delegates participated; they very unevenly represented the different regions of Algeria. In addition to the absence of the external delegation, there was no representative of the Aures-their leader, Mohammed Ben Boulald, had been killed, and his brother Omar could not come, given the constant movements of the French army. Oranais was represented only by Larbi Ben M'Hidi. Six delegates came from Zone n (North Constantinois): Youcef Zighoud, Lakhdar Ben Tobbal, Mostefa Benaouda, Brahim Mezhoudi, Ali Kafi, and Rouibah. Four came from Zone III (Kabylia): Belkacem Krim, Mohammedi SaId, Amirouche, and Kaci. Three came from Zone IV (Algerois): Amar Ouamrane, Slimane Dehiles, Ahmed Bouguerra. And one came from Zone VI (the south): Ali Mellah. These fifteen men were representatives of the combatants. The sixteenth, the only political secretary, was Abbane Ramdane.

From the deliberations of this congress, three major concerns emerged:

* an assessment of the material forces of the revolution, judged by the delegates to be moderately satisfactory. There was criticism of the weakness of weapons supply operations, and imbalances in the introduction of political structures were pointed out (good for Kabylia, despite the existence of a few Messalist strongholds, and for Constantinois; acceptable for Algerois; clearly lagging behind for Oranais)

* the drafting of a political platform-party put together by Amar Ouzegane, but profoundly bearing Abbane's mark-which was articulated around the principles of a collegial structure of the leadership, the primacy of the political over the military, and the domestic over the external

* a reorganization of the structure of the ALN, now modeled on a regular army. Algerian territory was carved up into six new wi/ayas, themselves subdivided into mintaka (zones), nahia (regions), and kasma (sectors); Algiers was set up as an autonomous zone. A strict hierarchy of battle units and ranks was instituted, which would give birth to the army, a true linchpin of the future Algerian state.

This "counterstate" in gestation was justified by the suffocating power of the colonial state. According to that argument, the pursuit of the pluralist traditions of Algerian nationalism prior to 1954 appeared too feeble a means for breaking free of the ponderous weight of French tutelage (Slimane Chikh 1981).

Although the Soummam Congress, the only one in the FLN's history, was historic in the "legislative" work it accomplished, it also inaugurated the struggle for control in the highest echelons of the nationalist organization. On September 23,1956, Abbane Ramdane (a native of Kabylia) sent a letter to Mohammed Khider, informing him of the congress's decisions. When Ben Bella learned of the letter and received the minutes of the congress, he decided to compose a three-point response. He insisted on the "nonrepresentative" character of the congress. "The Aures, the external delegation, Oranie, and the eastern zones did not attend, nor did the Federation de France." He attacked "the questioning, once again, of the Islamic character of our future political institutions" and thereby demonstrated his rejection of the secularism of the state, and his refusal to make a place for the European minority. Finally, he denounced the presence of former leaders of parties within the leading organizations. This reply repeated word for word the themes of the leadership of the PPA-MTLD against "the Berberists" of 1949 (Stora 1991 a: 111 ). But did not Abbane also accuse Ben Bella "of distrusting them because they were Kabyles"? Part of the reason for the dispute over legitimacy can be found in a "regionalist" explanation.

The Battle of the Guerrilla Forces

The principal unit of the ALN was the katiba-the equivalent of a light company-which might reach the size of one hundred men, or the platoon, about thirty men. These men eked out an existence in the territory constituting their field of operation, which they knew intimately for having traversed it in every direction.

Their solidarity was that of combatants waging war for the duration of the conflict, without any thought of return, constantly facing the same dangers and the same privations, whatever their rank or duties: the officer was no less spartan than the djoundi (soldier); the secretary, the medic, the radio operator, if there was one, all engaged in combat. It was not military ritual that made for cohesion. The link that united the mujahideen (fighters) was the blood spilled, the cause served, the danger marking their existence. It was also the acquisition of a discipline that, if breached, might entail a punishment of death-for example, for indecent behavior or a weapon in poor condition. It was also the shared background of these men, almost all of whom were coarse, rural folk, trained for a hard life since birth. Each man carried his ration of semolina or couscous; as often as possible, oil, chick-peas, and onions were part of the daily menu, as were sugar and coffee. Mutton and fresh fruit appeared only rarely. The medic did not always have the medications needed for the ill and wounded. Whereas battle was an ordeal, marching was hardly so for a mountain dweller or a peasant. Once he had become a soldier, he was equipped by the ALN with lightweight laced boots, called "Pataugas," made of coarse canvas with rubber soles. His equipment was limited to the minimum. He had no change of clothes. Except for a few food rations and possibly a blanket, nothing counted more than his weapon and ammunition. The unit was moving more or less constantly. In the first place, it had to be present everywhere, at intervals close enough to keep the population aware of its strength.

Truly offensive action always required that the katiba (or platoon) move secretly and quickly from one point to another that was as far away as possible, since in guerrilla warfare nothing works like surprise. That meant that marches, except those in the forest, were usually done at night along ridges, in wadi beds, or at best over goat trails. The soldiers slept out in the open. Without warning, an SAS post would be assaulted with mortar; a rural bus would be attacked and burned; or an ambush, carefully set up at a bend in the trail, would patiently wait for the military convoy that informers in the neighborhood had said was likely to pass. A hand-made mine, camouflaged in the dust, would blow up a vehicle, block the convoy line, and set off machine gun fire; then came the assault. At every moment, the FLN leader's concern was to avoid the surprise of an unexpected encounter with the adversary in full strength, or the chance of having his unit spotted out in the open. In that respect, the ALN's conditions of existence varied markedly depending on the period and region considered. In some rocky, wild, or wooded massif, or one still barely penetrated by the French army, an ALN unit would have its cantonments, usually several of them, sometimes in shelters dug in the ground, sometimes in a relatively depopulated hamlet: between two changes of location or two interventions, it could rest there more or less at ease.

In that underground war, the ordinary world was closed off for the fighter, who had no means of escape except death or definitive peace. It was in the years 1956 and 1957 that the ALN (with about sixty thousand men) had its greatest successes against French army troops, thanks primarily to the weapon supplies from Morocco and Tunisia. Things would be different after the construction of the barriers at the Tunisian and Moroccan borders.

Immigration, the Second Front

The 1954 census listed 211,000 Algerians in France; the 1962 census listed 350,000. During the same period, the Ministry of the Interior put out the figure of 436,000. Apart from considerations regarding the delicate problem of nationality and citizenship (who, in effect, was Algerian in 1962, the year of the census in France and of Algerian independence?), one fact became clear: Algerian immigration to France had doubled between 1954 and 1962, the very years of the war.

Most of the immigrants were men age twenty to forty. Of all the upheavals that rural Algerian society had experienced between 1955 and 1962, those that had been caused by the relocation of the population were the most profound and the most consequential. In 1960, half the rural population, that is, a quarter of the total population, was brutally displaced.

In addition to the "displacements," let us mention that one million "men of working age" were unemployed in Algeria. One wage earner out of two worked fewer than one hundred days per year. In total, from 1954 to 1960 only 45,000 new industrial jobs were created, of which 25,000 were in construction and public works. Demographic pressure worsened the process leading to unemployment. The population of Muslim Algerians went from 4,890,000 in 1921 to 8,800,000 in 1954. The active male population increased by 385,000, which means that beginning in 1955 it would have been necessary to create 70,000 new jobs annually for the young men of working age. Since that was far from the case, immigration became the last hope.

The need to replace men of the French contingent sent to fight in Algeria and the renovation of the internal French social structure are the two essential elements allowing us to understand the paradox of the large number of Algerians who emigrated to a country that was at war with them.
In examining the geographical distribution of Algerians in the metropolis, we find that five departments continued to serve as centers of attraction; the Seine; the Nord, with the Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing agglomeration, which had coal mining and heavy industry; the Moselle, which was experiencing an industrial boom; the Rhone, with Lyons; and the Bouches-du-Rhone, with Marseilles. There were few Algerians engaged in agriculture; most were located in the industrialized regions. Their concentration in the industrial zones only became more pronounced in the years 1948-1955.

The FLN federation in the metropolis retained roughly the same structure as the MTLD, to which a large number of its members belonged. The FLN divided the country into five regions; the Paris region and the west (Paris); the northern and eastern region (Longwy); the central region (Lyons); the southeastern region (Marseilles); and the southwestern region, still unorganized in 1956. The organization had approximately eight thousand members in June 1956, but thanks to an improvement in recruitment the number of militants registered approached fifteen thousand in 1957 (Stora 1992).

The Algerian nationalist movements, applying the principle that the success of an enterprise is a function of the financial means its organizers possess, devoted their efforts to developing and increasing their sources of revenue. The high cost of weapons for the guerrilla forces, the requirements of diplomatic action, and the support of families of militants who had been detained or killed pushed expenses ever higher. The development of the clandestine organization also required installing new cadres paid by the parties.

To take the year 1961 as an example, given the number of paying members in the FLN (150,000) and the MNA (10,000), and the increase in membership fees to 30 francs per person, we obtain the figure of 58 million new francs total (about 400 million 1993 francs) for the single year 1961. Nearly 6 billion centimes raised for the single year 1961! In the seven years of war, approximately 400 million new francs (slightly more than 3 billion 1993 francs) were collected from the Algerian immigrants in France. An altogether substantial contribution, made by the "second front" of Algerian nationalism, a contribution obtained sometimes voluntarily and sometimes by force.

The FLN's Doctrine

The radical pro-independence movement drew its strength from the fact that it was located at the intersection of two major projects: that of the Socialist movement and that of the Islamic tradition.

Of the first aspect, that of the French influence, let us say first of all that the birthplace of the pro-independence movement (Paris in 1926) influenced its subsequent ideological development. The French experience taught the first radical Algerian militants the models of organization and the rudiments of socialist ideology by which they would analyze the situation of their nation and seek to understand the mechanisms and values of an alien world; in the end, that experience put them in contact with industrial and urban models of life. But once they had returned to Algeria, they could not realize their aspirations in the leftist unions or parties, which were dominated by the Europeans.

Regarding that "French influence," let us also note that most of the nationalist cadres in the FLN were rootless, cut off from their social origins and integrated in a way that often led them to become "professional revolutionaries." The movement had few peasant leaders or intellectuals. For the most part, however, these leaders were better educated and better informed than the majority of the Algerian people. Many had gone to French schools, and had completed elementary school. It is an irony of history that the French school system, which saw itself as assimilationist, in fact appears to have opened paths of criticism and liberation.

On the benches of French schools in the Third Republic, the republican credo and the episodes in the "Great Revolution" of 1789 left a lasting impression on the minds of the Muslim Algerians who become nationalists. Their curiosity about France's history was sustained by a hope; they took an interest in it because they felt at a loss about their own freedom. An abstract France with universal principles was contrasted to the temporal France. That conception continued to be asserted during the time of the Algerian War, as this letter from prison attests, written by Mohammed Larbi Madi, an FLN leader: "I confess to you that I am less and less able to separate the real France from the statutory France. I am seeking the France I learned of in school, and I find it only in a few French people, who, in fact, are embarrassed to be French where the Algerian War is concerned" (Perville 1984).

Regarding the second principal factor, that of Islam, we must first of all explain that almost all Algerians in the first half of the twentieth century remained faithful to the religious customs of their ancestors. That fidelity was composed of social relics and habits, an attachment to practices where conformity played as great a role as personal conviction. Pro-independence politics reactivated the religious factor. Islam was both a combat ideology and a social project. The reacquisition of the terms and rights fixed by time, the increasingly lost "paradise" of origins, became more and more vital through religion. The promised pro-independence revolution still had certain characteristics of revolts based on millenarian hopes, or of riots for subsistence. This type of nationalist ideology produced a refusal to compromise with the existing world. A central event, independence, was the long-awaited and un-hoped-for moment, the sense of a future and specially of a pure present. The Algerian militants experienced the colonial institutions in which they were destined to live not as founded in reason but as perfectly arbitrary.

The historical merit of the leaders who set off the insurrection in November 1954 was that, through weapons, they unjammed the colonial status quo. They allowed the idea of independence to take on substance for millions of Algerians. But, as the Algerian sociologist Abdelkader Djeghloul (1990) notes, "the war set in motion a process of destruction of the capital of democratic experience and modern politics, which the different political organizations had begun to accumulate before 1954."

The FLN, aware of the contradictions that permeated it, constantly bowed to the tactical emergency: draining off convictions, mobilizing the available energy in the cause of independence, while putting off until later any examination of the particulars. That conception of an undifferentiated society "guided" by a single party implied a particular vision of the nation. After independence, an undecomposable bloc, the nation, was perceived as a unified and unanimous--indissociable-figure.

The theme of the "people united" reduced the threat of external aggression (Gallicization, assimilation) and internal disintegration (regionalism, linguistic particularism). The latter had to do primarily with the "Berber question," which was disregarded in the establishment of national institutions in the post-war period. The recourse to populism increased the rift between the real society, which was socially and culturally diverse, and the one-party political system, forged primarily during the second part of the war, between 1958 and 1962. In December 1957, the murder of Abbane Ramdane (the organizer of the Soummam Congress who had advocated the supremacy of "politicos" over the "military"), ordered by other FLN leaders, opened the way for the "border army's" political domination of Algerian nationalism. After the construction of the barriers along the Tunisian and Moroccan borders, the army was camped outside Algerian territory. Led by Houari Boumedienne, its importance and its role increased as of 1958.

The International Action of the FLN

The Algerian nationalists realized the risk of finding themselves face to face with the formidable French war machine. Very quickly, they became aware of the need to broaden their audience to the international level. The armed struggle was thus combined with political and diplomatic action. The objective was to heighten public awareness throughout the world of the cause of Algerian independence, to interest foreign governments, and to mobilize such international authorities as the UN and the Red Cross. That internationalization of the conflict, desired by the FLN, would allow it to find material support (deliveries of weapons, especially from Eastern countries), and moral support (pressure on France regarding its Algerian policy).

From the beginning of the conflict in January 1955, the members of the Arab League, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, directed the attention of the UN's Security Council to the gravity of the situation in Algeria. The Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations in April 1955 heard the communications of the Algerian leaders. In September of the same year, the UN placed the problem of the "events of Algeria" on its agenda for the first time. In July 1956, the Union Generale des Travailleurs Algeriens, or UGTA (General Union of Algerian Workers), a union organization linked to the FLN, was recognized by the ICFTU (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions) over its competitor, the Union des Syndicats des Travailleurs Algeriens, or USTA (Algerian Workers' Federation of Unions), run by MNA militants. At the same time, the Union Generale des Etudiants Musulmans Algeriens, or UGEMA (General Union of Muslim Algerian Students), actively participated in different worldwide cultural groups and developed an intense propaganda campaign (Perville 1984).

In that way, the Soummam Congress in August 1956 established the FLN's international actions: "Externally, seek out the maximum material, moral, and psychological support. Among the governments of the Bandung Congress, incite the intervention of the UN as well as diplomatic pressure ...on France." In 1956, when the UN once more put the Algerian question on the agenda (Gadant 1988), FLN delegations set off on a mission: to Eastern Europe (East Berlin, Prague), Western Europe (Bonn, Rome, London), the United States (New York), China, India, and Latin America.

The two events that accelerated and broadened the internationalization of the Algerian conflict were the hijacking of the plane of FLN leaders on October 22, 1956, and the French bombing of the Tunisian village of Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef on February 8, 1958, which had a particularly strong emotional effect on world opinion. On the eve of the Fourth Republic's fall, France found itself brought up on charges by the UN. Atlantic and European solidarity was very uncertain on the question of North Africa.

In waging war against France, the Algerian nationalists set in place "a diplomacy of guerrillas." Very early on, they constructed a diplomatic apparatus, an external presentation that would continue to function effectively after independence in 1962.

[Millen]

thx man great wrighting

[Yosy]

Chapter 5, De Gaulle and the War (1958-1959)

Toward the Fall of the Fourth Republic

On January 11, 1958, a platoon of draftees was ambushed near the Tunisian border. Four soldiers of the contingent were taken across and held captive. Salan appealed for the right to pursue, and the government consented. For its part, the navy seized a Yugoslav freighter, The Slovenija, off Oran on January 18. It was transporting 148 metric tons of weapons from Czechoslovakia to the ALN training camps in Morocco.

In fact, a number of countries were now aiding the FLN, including the United Kingdom and the United States, which delivered weapons to Tunisia. On February 8, Salan authorized bombers to pursue an ALN column into Tunisian territory. The village of Sakiet-Sidi-Youssef was targeted. Sixty-nine civilians were killed, one hundred thirty wounded. After that scandal, a true disaster for France's international image, the French government found itself obliged to accept an Anglo-American "goodwill" mission. That mission would study the problem of the French presence in Tunisia, and especially the Bizerte base, which Bourguiba was demanding be evacuated.

During these three months, the ALN pursued its efforts against the Morice Line: the electrified barrier demonstrated its utility and allowed the government to consider shortening the length of military service (to twenty-four months instead of twenty-six in 1957), and to cut back on the army's expenses. That was enough to aggravate the pieds noirs and the army, who were united against the parties supporting the government. The Courrier de la Colere, run by Michel Debre, who was close to General de Gaulle, lashed out against the use of the UN. On March 13, 1958, police officers violently demonsttated against the government in front of the Palais-Bourbon. On April 15, Felix Gaillard, who appeared to be ceding to the pressures of NATO and the "missionaries" Robert Murphy and Harold Beeley, was voted out by the coalition of Communists, Gaullists, and Poujadists. The government teetered on the brink (Winock 1985).

The crisis of the parliamentary government, the paralysis that set in within the administration, the fall of the franc, linked to France's loss of credit in the world market, the foreign trade deficit, and finally, the climate of powerlessness that was reaching the highest echelons of the state, which faced thorny problems raised by the Algerian War, joined together to make the Fourth Republic succumb to impotence. In Algeria, there was an ineluctable chain of events. The "centurions" in the paratrooper units, who had sullied their hands, the officers of the bled, and the SAS leaders who dreamed of resuming Lyautey's work, pledged their honor and their word. They could no longer tolerate the constant upheaval in the government, the secret contacts with emissaries of the FLN, the pressure from abroad.

May 13,1958

On April 26, 1958, several thousand demonstrators marched in Algiers to demand a government of public safety. The previous day General Salan had announced that the army would accept nothing less than the total defeat of the "rebels," followed by the possibility of amnesty. For a month, the Parliament had proved incapable of finding a new premier. On May 8, President Rene Coty was at a loss and appealed to the centrist Pierre Pfimlin (MRP), who publicly announced his intention to open negotiations with the FLN. Salan officially protested and many leaders of the Europeans of Algeria denounced this "diplomatic Dien Bien Phu." The same day, the FLN announced the execution of three prisoners of the contingent. The situation had gotten away from Robert Lacoste, who was summoned to Paris on May 10.

In Algeria the army remained the sole authority; the "defense committees of French Algeria" and the veterans called for a mass demonstration on May 13 as a tribute to the executed soldiers, and to force a change of government in France. That day had extraordinary consequences. The students in Algiers who formed the shock troops of the supporters of French Algeria decided to gather on the Forum in front of the offices of the general government to attract the official procession paying tribute to the memory of the executed soldiers. The operation succeeded beyond the hopes of its various protagonists. The mob did not disperse and finally threw itself against the gates of the general government, defended by the state security police (CRS), which Colonel Godard quickly replaced with the paratroopers of Colonel Trinquier's Third Colonial Paratroopers' Regiment (RPC). A GMC truck belonging to this regiment providentially served as a battering ram for the most determined of the rioters, who were swept into the building beside the paratroopers. A few moments later, the high command joined in the revelry. Stunned by the spectacle, Massu and Salan were trapped inside the building by the throng of demonstration leaders: Leon Delbecque, Lucien Neuwirth, Pouget, Pierre Lagaillarde, and Thomazo.

While the Pfimlin government, which was invested at night between May 13 and 14, asserted its will in the metropolis to defend French sovereignty by declaring a blockade on Algeria in reaction to the riot, General Salan took over the unplanned meeting of the "Committee of Public Safety," presided over by General Massu, who was head of the Tenth Paratroopers' Division. This committee, imitated by dozens of others, assigned itself the mission of facilitating General de Gaulle's accession to power. Salan proclaimed as much the next day in front of the crowd. For months, in fact, the rumor had been gaining strength. First a mere murmur, a hypothesis made by the jurist Maurice Duverger in the columns of Le Monde, an idea accepted by Rene Coty, who said he was ready to step down, the solution gradually took root everywhere: only General de Gaulle could pull France out of the Algerian quagmire. Would he be the champion of independence or of steadfastness? A skillful politician, he refused to commit himself so long as he did not have power. What he desired first was "to restore state authority," to join a new government tailor-made for him, endowed with strong presidential power.

General de Gaulle's Return to Power

After several weeks of urging by his supporters, General de Gaulle finally broke his silence by declaring on May 15 that "in the face of the ordeals once more mounting" in the country, he stood "ready to assume the powers of the Republic." The army, whose chief of staff, General Paul Ely, had resigned, no longer obeyed the government. The rumor spread that paratroopers were preparing to land in the metropolis to impose a government of public safety. On May 19, General de Gaulle, in front of the press summoned to the Palais d'Orsay, again asserted that he was at the disposition of the country. He declared that, at sixty-seven, he had no intention of "beginning a career as a dictator." Antoine Pinay, who had been premier in 1952, returned from his visit to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises on May 22 with the assurance that General de Gaulle had refused to lead a coup d'etat fomented by the regular army. But the dissidence moved to Corsica on May 24, where the prefecture was besieged by the men of May 13, Thomazo and Pascal Arrighi in the lead, with the support of the paratroopers of the Eleventh shock troops in Calvi, which disarmed the state security forces (CRS) without encountering resistance. The population of Bastia gleefully witnessed the expulsion of the vice-mayor, who had remained faithful to the government.

At that moment public opinion in the metropolis was convinced that only General de Gaulle could resolve the crisis, eliminate the prospect of civil war, and end the Algerian War. The images of the May 16 "fraternization" in Algiers [when some pieds noirs went into the Casbah to demonstrate their sympathy with the indigeneous people, but not their support for independence-trans.] had spread the illusion that the Muslims wanted assimilation. Reconciliation seemed possible.

On the night of May 26-27, the officers' work finally paid off: Pfimlin and de Gaulle exchanged their viewpoints in a building in the park of Saint-Cloud in Paris. The premier was persuaded to resign. The next day, a press release from General de Gaulle announced that he "was beginning the regular process necessary for the establishment of a republican government capable of ensuring the unity and independence of the country." The Europeans of Algeria put out the flags: this time, the general had "spoken," as he had been invited to do on May 11 by the former Petainist Alain de Serigny, in his newspaper L 'Echo d'Algerie. The army and the pieds noirs witnessed the series of events with joy: Pfimlin's resignation, followed on June 1 by General de Gaulle's investiture by the assembly, despite the success of the demonstration held by the left on May 28 to "defend the Republic."

Between June 4 and 7, General de Gaulle took a trip to Algeria. He gave speeches in Algiers (with the famous "I have understood you"), in Mostaganem (where he shouted "Long live French Algeria," for which he would later be sharply criticized), to Oran, Constantine, and Bone, proclaiming that there were in Algeria "only Frenchmen through and through, with the same rights and the same duties." It was the end of the Fourth Republic and the advent of the Fifth. A new constitution was put forward that gave the president of the Republic a great deal of power. He could dissolve the National Assembly (article 12), he possessed full powers in case of grave events (article 16). In that constitution, the executive power was placed beyond the reach of Parliament, whose role was considerably reduced.

On September 28, 1958, the Europeans and the Muslims (both men and women) voted overwhelmingly in favor of the constitution of the Fifth Republic. And, on October 3 in Constantine, they learned from General de Gaulle's own mouth of the future economic and social transformations that the government had committed itself to financing in Algeria: 15 billion francs in public works projects and urban development, and a gradual program for schooling young Muslims. On December 21, 1958, General de Gaulle was elected president of the French Republic and of the French Community.

General de Gaulle's Algerian Policy

In hindsight, there can be no doubt about General de Gaulle's will. The notorious "I have understood you" was a statement, not a commitment. There was also a "Long live French Algeria" in Mostaganem-but only one. Very quickly, the plan became clear. Between June and December 1958, General de Gaulle asserted his will to bring together the Muslims and the Europeans, but banished from his speeches the expressions "French Algeria" and "integration." Beginning on August 28, a sentence uttered during one of his trips to Algeria put the proponents of French Algeria on the alert: "The necessary evolution of Algeria must come about within the French framework." The pieds noirs began to worry. The obligatory departure of military personnel from all the committees of public safety and the notice they received that they were banned from running in the Algerian legislative elections managed to cast suspicion on General de Gaulle's intentions. At the same time, de Gaulle was decolonizing Madagascar and the rest of Africa. The press conference on October 23, 1958, shook the last souls clinging to the memory of May 13 and the Mostaganem speech: General de Gaulle offered "the peace of the brave" with no conditions other than that of leaving the "knife in the cloakroom." But the FLN, which formed the Gouvernement Provisoire de la Republique Algerienne, or GPRA (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic), on September 19, 1958, rejected that call for surrender and increased its actions in the metropolis. All the same, 1958 ended with goodwill gestures: a presidential pardon for convicts in the FLN, which in response, liberated French prisoners of war.

On the evening of September 16, 1959, General de Gaulle appeared on television. He explained that eighteen months after his return to power the economy was recovering. But then came the shock:

"Given all the facts in Algeria, national and international, I consider it necessary that the recourse to self-determination be proclaimed beginning today. In the name of France and the Republic, by virtue of the power vested in me by the constitution to consult the citizenry, on the condition that God may grant me life and that the people may listen to me, I commit myself to asking, on the one hand, the Algerians in their twelve departments what they definitively want to be, and, on the other, all the French people to endorse that choice."

General de Gaulle did not set precise deadlines or a time line for a possible negotiation. He also asserted that, in case of secession, "all arrangements would be made for the exploitation, transport, and shipping of Saharan oil, which, be assured, is the work of the army and in the interests of the West as a whole, whatever may happen."

But, after five years of a cruel war, begun on November 1, 1954, a war that still did not dare speak its name, the taboo word had been uttered: "self-determination." The illusions and ambiguities of General de Gaulle's policy were now dispelled. The head of state, rejecting integration, which he called "Gallicization," offered the Algerians the choice between partnership and secession. That speech of September 16, 1959, marked a true turning point in French political life, which had been poisoned by the Algerian question. It implied open negotiation with the FLN, and granted the Muslim population (who had a nine-tenths majority) the right to decide Algeria's fate. The proponents of French Algeria immediately cried treason and shouted that they had been duped. They pointed out that the principles proclaimed in the days of May and June 1958 were being called into question, since French Algeria was no longer a matter of fact, but was becoming a referendum question. Following that speech, it was not long before the political battle set in motion revealed divisions within the Union pour la Nouvelle Republique, or UNR (Union for the New Republic): nine Gaullist deputies left the organization on October 8, 1959. On September 19, Georges Bidault created the Rassemblement pour I' Algerie Francaise, or RAF (Union for French Algeria). In it were Christian Democrats as well as "Soustellian" Gaullists and Algerian elected officials favoring integration. The only party that completely embraced General de Gaulle's position was the MRP. During the parliamentary debate of October 6, General Challe spoke of "integral pacification." That was the sign of a hardening of the army, which would not hear of "negotiation" and wanted to continue the war until victory was achieved.

On the other side, on September 28, 1959, the GPRA set out independence as the pre-requisite to any negotiation. On November 20, the Algerian nationalists designated Ahmed Ben Bella and his fellow prisoners to negotiate with France, which rejected that suggestion. The Algerians' distrust can be explained in great part by the considerable scope the war had taken on under General de Gaulle's orders.

Under General de Gaulle, the War Continues

In 1959, in fact, General de Gaulle ordered the army to strike its harshest blows against the ALN, to force it to negotiate for the conditions set by France. Salan was transferred to Paris on December 19, 1958; General Challe replaced him.

In 1959, General Challe, with his 500,000 men, launched large-scale combined operations against the guerrilla forces of the ALN. His "hunt commandos" obtained conclusive results and broke up the katibas in the wilayas of Kabylia and the Aures, which were already weakened by internal purges incited by the poison introduced by the Second Bureau (the intelligence service). On March 28, Colonels Amirouche and Si Haoues, responsible for wilayas III (Kabylia) and VI (Sahara), respectively, were killed in battle. On July 22, a general military action, the "Jumelles" operation, which put more than twenty thousand men on the line, was set in motion in Kabylia under General Challe's control. Nevertheless, "pacification" remained spotty in these "thousand villages" where displaced populations had been assembled by force. But, among the officers, thanks to the major operations of General Challe, the impression prevailed that they were finally gaining ground: the FLN katibas were tracked down, and many were destroyed. Small, hungry groups holed up in the most remote of the mountainous massifs. It was a terrible war for the Algerians: more than 2 million peasants were displaced. On April 28, 1959, Michel Rocard, then a young high official, had sent a report to the minister of justice criticizing the re-settlement camps in Algeria. And, on January 5, 1960, Le Monde published the international commission's report on the internment camps in Algeria, which caused a great stir.

On January 18, 1960, the German newspaper Siiddeutsche Zeitung published an interview in which General Massu declared that the army, "which has the forces" and "will call on them if the situation requires it," no longer understood General de Gaulle's Algerian policy. A denial was published, but Massu was summoned to Paris and was replaced on January 22 by General Jean Crepin as commander of the army corps in Algiers. Rumors of insurrection circulated. In April 1959, General de Gaulle had indicated, "The old Algeria is dead, and if you don't understand that, you will die along with it." In early 1960, the Algerian War entered a new phase, that of a Franco-French confrontation in which some would want to "die for Algeria."

[Yosy]

Chapter 6, The Wars within the War (1960-1961)

Barricades Week

The pieds noirs knew that, since they were outnumbered nine to one, they were done for if France abandoned them. There had been too many deaths, personal assaults, acts of torture, and summary executions. The day "they" would come down from the Casbah or the mountains would be a massacre. "They" were already beginning to demonstrate in the cities, to the cries of "Long live de Gaulle," "Long live the FLN." For the residents of Bab-el-Oued, on the outskirts of Algiers, or of Oran, it was the beginning of the great panic. The time was past for tchatche (chitchat) that scoffed at the patos (metropolitans). Without their help, it was "the suitcase or the coffin."

On January 24, 1960, in Algiers, the pied noir activists clashed with the gendarmes. A shooting on boulevard Laferriere left twenty dead (fourteen gendarmes and six demonstrators) and one hundred and fifty wounded, before the paratroopers intervened. Pierre Lagaillarde and Joseph Ortizl then set up an entrenched camp in the center of Algiers in the name of French Algeria. General Gracieux's Tenth Paratroopers' Division and the European community did not bring them the hoped-for support. On January 28, Paul Oelouvrier, general delegate in Algeria, launched an appeal to the army, the Muslims, and the Europeans, asking them to trust General de Gaulle. On January 29, in a televised declaration (this was at a time when he was appearing often on television), General de Gaulle formally condemned the rioters and, addressing himself to the army, declared: "I must be obeyed by all French soldiers."

Disheartened, the rioters in Algiers surrendered on February 1 and abandoned the barricades. Joseph Ortiz fled. Pierre Lagaillarde was transfered and incarcerated in the La Sante Prison. The next day, on February 2, the National Assembly, summoned for a special session, granted the government special powers for a year, "to keep the peace and safeguard the state." But "Barricades Week" had revealed some wavering in the command. General de Gaulle ordered changes: General Challe was transferred and replaced by Crepin on March 30. Jacques Soustelle, an ardent supporter of French Algeria, left the government on February 5. And Alain de Serigny, managing editor of L'Echo d'Algerie, was charged on February 8 with conspiracy to attack the internal security of the state. The Algerian affair defined the shape of a true Franco-French confrontation under way. General de Gaulle tried to be reassuring, tried to head off the danger. From March 3 to March 5, he undertook a "tour of the canteens" in Algeria, and declared that the Algerian problem would not be settled until after the victory of French arms. He knew, however, that the question was political, and that a resolute change of course was needed.

Initiatives for an End to the War

In spring 1960, the French army believed it had won the war. The "pacified" Oranie was cited as an example: civilian vehicles could now circulate without escort in the rural areas. The leaders of wilaya IV, that of Algerois, judged that the battle was lost, and made contact with French officers. They were secretly brought to the Elysee Palace: this would be "the Si Salah affair," named for the nationalist Algerian leader who met with General de Gaulle on June 10, 1960. His real name was Mohamed Zamoum and, unbeknownst to the FLN leaders in Tunis, he intended to undertake direct negotiations with France.

Would there finally be the peace of the brave with those who had fought so fiercely in the field? No. De Gaulle had already begun the negotiation with the FLN "politicos," who possessed the beginnings of international recognition and the notorious "border army," which had never been able to cross en masse the two electrified barriers isolating Algeria from Tunisia and Morocco (as for "Si Salah," he would be executed on June 20, 1961, by special units of the French army).

The first talks between the FLN and the French government opened in Melun on June 25, 1960. They were a failure, but the negotiation created enormous hope in France: peace and the return of the contingent seemed at hand. The Algerian leaders Ferhat Abbas and Lakhdar Ben Tobbal traveled the world to gather votes for the forthcoming UN debate. The recognition of the FLN's representativeness grew among France's African allies. On August 3, 1959, a conference of nine independent African states had invited France to recognize the Algerian people's right to self-determination. In the metropolis, the leftist organizations publicly affirmed their solidarity with the" Algerian cause." On June 2, 1960, fifty-three youth movements, taking a common position for the first time, expressed their desire to see the Algerian War end. On June 9, the Union Nationale des Etudiants de France, or UNEF (National Union of Students in France) met with one of the leaders of a dissolved organization, the Union Generale des Etudiants Musulmans Algeriens (UGEMA), and demanded a cease-fire and self-determination. On June 30, the Confederation Generale du Travail, or CGT (General Confederation of Labor), the Confederation Francaise des Travailleurs Chretiens, or CFTC (French Confederation of Christian Workers), the FEN, and the UNEF signed a joint declaration affirming their desire to see negotiations truly begin between the French government and the GPRA.

Just as the trial of the members of the FLN's support network, called the "Jeanson network," was getting under way (September 5), 121 major figures made public a "manifesto on the right to insubordination" (published by François Maspero) on September 6, 1960. Several indictments followed. An order published on September 29 in the Journal Officiel set out particular sanctions for the signers who were government employees, and a ban on radio or television appearances for all signers. On October 1, fifteen of the accused in the "Jeanson network" were sentenced to ten years in prison. In spite of that act of repression, the antiwar protest movement grew. On October 27, UNEF held an important demonstration at the Mutualite "for peace through negotiation."

In Algeria the Europeans and the high command had their minds made up. The old Algeria was truly dead, and the FLN had recovered through politics and diplomacy all the ground lost by the use of force. On November 4, 1960, General de Gaulle tried to precipitate a resolution of the affair: he used the expression" Algerian Republic" and announced a referendum on the principle of self-determination in Algeria. In December 1960, General de Gaulle's trip to Algeria was the pretext, in Algiers and Oran, for violent demonstrations by Europeans. But the important new fact was the massive uprising of the urban Algerian masses. The demonstrators shouted "Muslim Algeria!" and "Long live the FLN!" Gendarmes and state security troops (CRS) fired on them. The official death toll was 112 Muslims in Algiers.

On January 8, 1961, General de Gaulle's Algerian policy was submitted to a referendum vote. In the metropolis 72.25 percent and in Algeria 69.09 percent voted yes. The success of this referendum, even in Algeria, where only the large cities voted no, demonstrated to the diehards of French Algeria that they had to make haste. Georges Pompidou, in the name of the Debre government, led a secret diplomatic mission to Switzerland. The day after the meeting between General de Gaulle and Bourguiba in Rambouillet, on February 27, a relieved France learned that negotiations would open in Evian on April 7. It was then that General Salan, banished from Algeria, believed that the moment had come to plan a kind of counter-revolution with the help of the regular army, disheartened by the fighting, and of panic-stricken Europeans. Contacts were established in the metropolis. The Organisation Armee Secrete, or OAS (Secret Army Organization), was created. The revolt against General de Gaulle did not mobilize only fanatics dreaming of an impossible Algeria. Barricades Week in January 1960 had already shown the crisis of conscience within certain units.

The Generals' Putsch

During a press conference on April 2, the head of state confimed his new orientation: "Decolonization is in our interest, and, as a result, it is our policy," said General de Gaulle. Thereafter, a few of the most highly placed people in the French army decided to organize a putsch against him. To hold onto French Algeria, General Challe, who arrived secretly in Algiers, launched the adventure of a coup d'etat against the Republic, along with Generals Jouhaud, Zeller, and Salan.

At midnight on Friday, April 21,1961, the Green Berets in the First Foreign Regiment of Paratroopers marched on Algiers and seized the general government, the airfield, the city hall, and the weapons depot. Within three hours the city was in the hands of the putschists and in the morning Algiers residents could hear over the airwaves this communique, which had fallen into the army's hands: "I am in Algiers with Generals Zeller and Jouhaud, and in contact with General Salan to keep our pledge, the army's pledge to keep Algeria."

In Paris the government confined itself to announcing that it was "taking the necessary measures" and decreted a state of emergency. Moreover, the army was not moving to rally behind the putschists. General de Gaulle already seemed persuaded of the failure of the military guerrillas. At five o'clock p.m. in the Council of Ministers, he commented: "The grave thing about this affair is that it is not serious."

But as Salan was being cheered by the mob in Algiers, Paris was in fear of a military coup d'etat and a disembarkation in the capital. De Gaulle decided to apply article 16 of the Constitution, which confered nearly all powers on the president of the Republic. On Sunday evening, he spoke on television in a peremptory tone. He denounced "the attempt of a smatt