A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (49 page)

His successor, however, Omar Boudaoud, who held the leading role in France through to the end of the war, maintained and improved on Lebjaoui’s groundwork with considerable efficiency; between May 1957 and May 1958 the F.L.N. extended its sway to embrace something like ninety per cent of the Algerians in France. Apart from one or two ineptly handled assassination attempts on
pied noir
notables—such as Senator Henri Borgeaud—in August 1958 there was a concerted wave of sabotage as a counterblast against the initial success of de Gaulle. But on the whole the Fédération de France was never to push the war of violence in France to the limit. Its principal contribution lay in the financing of the war. Through its well-organised system of collectors, it milked every Algerian in France on a sliding scale—500 francs a month for students, 3,000 for workers to 50,000 and upwards for shopkeepers—which were often oppressively large sums in relation to their wretched pay packets. Already by the beginning of 1958 the total thus collected reached 600 million (old) francs (£600,000) a year and was soon exceeding the two-and-a-half milliard mark. Most of it was in grubby notes of small denominations, and their safe shipment out of France to where they could be used for the purchase of arms presented a major problem. Any Algerian acting as courier would immediately attract suspicion. It was here that Lebjaoui’s relations with the French intellectual Left paid off.

The Jeanson network

One of his first contacts in France had been Francis Jeanson, Marxist, professor, writer, publisher and editor. During the war Jeanson had escaped into Spain to join the Free French but had been thrown into a concentration camp, which had ruined his health. On being released he had made his way to Algeria where he acquired many nationalist friends, and in 1955 he and his wife, Colette, had published a book,
L’Algérie
hors
la Loi
, fiercely critical of French policy. He was a close friend of Sartre, and author of a biography of him. But, though resounding in the written and spoken word about the Algerian war, neither of the Sartre ménage was prepared to follow through with action to the same extent as Jeanson. “I shied away,” admits Simone de Beauvoir. But during Jeanson’s trial three years later Sartre was to declare, with some bravado, “If Jeanson had asked me to carry dispatch cases or give shelter to militant Algerians, and I had been able to do so without risk to them, I should have agreed to do so without hesitation….” Following the arrest of Lebjaoui, Jeanson had spun together a remarkable network—reminiscent of the French Resistance—of no fewer than forty like-minded French men and women. For three years he operated, without receiving any pay or direct orders from the F.L.N. Jeanson’s motives, as he explains them, were the “ignoble behaviour of the forces of order” that he had witnessed in Algeria between 1945 and 1954, and he did not want to be yet another of the French “theoreticians” always giving advice to the Algerians, of which they were tired. Jeanson admits, “Yes, the arms we financed might have been used to shoot French soldiers in the back,” resorting to a
tu quoque
argument on F.L.N. atrocities. In a somewhat far-flung analogy, he claims that, just as Stalinist crimes were “made almost inevitable by the hostility of the entire world”, so “the Algerians do what they can, starting from the unbelievable conditions in which
you
put them—or let them be put”. In addition to sheltering F.L.N. militants on the run in France, by far the most important of the Jeanson network’s functions was shipping out of the country the F.L.N. funds to Switzerland in suitcases stuffed with tatty, soiled notes. For three years, until his network was broken up, in what seems like extraordinary incompetence on the part of the French security services, Jeanson carried on with this traffic undisturbed, and in one year he managed to smuggle out ten billion francs. The money was deposited in Swiss banks, where it earned a helpful interest—to the disapproval of the pure-minded Boudaoud, who considered such capitalist jugglings to be “non-revolutionary”. Some, but by no means all, of this Swiss money went to the purchase of arms for the F.L.N.; the fate of the remainder was to become one of the more bizarre postscripts to the Algerian war, still unconcluded to this day.

Mollet falls: France’s twenty-two days without government

On 21 May 1957 Guy Mollet fell, after a turbulent run of sixteen months—the longest in the Fourth Republic. His fall had, in fact, been on the cards since two months previously when he had faced a vote of confidence on his Algerian policy. After more than a year in office he had sadly little to show; the first and major round in the Battle of Algiers had been won, but at a considerable cost in terms of public opinion, and meanwhile the war still ground on; the basic reforms that he and Lacoste had wanted to introduce had, as usual, been diluted by the
pied noir
lobby. He had stuck faithfully to his peace time-table of (1) cease-fire; (2) elections; (3) negotiations; but the F.L.N. had assiduously ignored the fly, and there were no longer any “third force”
interlocuteurs valables
to rise to it. On 21 March Mollet had scraped by with 221 votes to 188, with 110 abstentions, but he was living on borrowed time. Since Suez the Communists had withdrawn support from Mollet’s Socialist coalition, and in May they were joined by the Right in attacking the government on the acute inflation that gripped France. (“The French”, commented Mollet bitterly, “have the most stupid Right in the world.”) For the first four months of 1957 the national deficit had risen to three times the total for the whole of 1955, and to meet it the government was forced to introduce such unpopular measures as an increase in the price of petrol and postage, and a thirty per cent surtax on dividends. Defending his economic policy at his thirty-fourth vote of confidence on 21 May, Mollet went down with 250 votes to 213 and seventy abstentions. With him departed the last chance of stable government under the Fourth Republic.

Though the immediate cause of his defeat was the financial crisis in France, as always the dominant background factor was Algeria. “It is one of the characteristics of our regime”, remarked Jacques Soustelle in his book,
Aimée et Souffrante Algérie
, published that same year, “that no issue, however vital to the nation, is ever treated fundamentally and on its own account, but as a function of other questions and above all of the parliamentary situation”. He went on to predict, with some accuracy, that Algeria would be lost “not from a collapse on the military front in Algeria, but on the interior front in France”. Indeed, the fall of Mollet was to bring the spotlight once more to focus on all the confusions of issues, the self-divisions, oscillations of policy and fundamental weaknesses that were intrinsic to the Fourth Republic and were rapidly making France ungovernable. In the Assembly the solid Communist bloc, representing a fairly steady fifth of the electorate, was an ever-present ingredient in the paralysis of any consistent policy. Together with the extremists of the Right, their presence meant that consensus required the support of almost all other factions combined, and there were seldom issues simple or clear enough for this. Thus, repeatedly, a tiny minority of Poujadists and the “Algiers lobby” of maybe no more than ten deputies would suffice to swing an anti-reformist vote on Algeria. As Alfred Grosser notes in his
La IVe République et sa politique extérieure
, the essential tragedy of the French liberal conscience at this time was this: “To bring liberty to overseas people, there is no majority without Communists. But to defend the liberties that Communism seeks to destroy, the only majority is with those who refuse liberty to Asians and Africans….”

Bourgeès-Maunoury comes and goes

After twenty-two days of comings and goings at the Elysée and no government, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury—Mollet’s former Defence Minister, aged only 43, an energetic and distinguished Second World War combatant—managed to form a ministry. Typical of the vagaries of Fourth Republic politics, his new Minister of Finance, Félix Gaillard, succeeded in getting the Assembly to swallow a Finance Bill even tougher than that which had torpedoed Mollet. As far as Algeria was concerned, Bourgès-Maunoury pressed ahead with the old mixture as before—the twin-headed policy of pacification and reform—but with perhaps a new sense of urgency. Lacoste remained in Algiers, and a new and vigorous Minister of Defence, André Morice, rushed forward the imposing barrage system on Algeria’s frontiers that was to bear his name. Its object was to “contain” the war and check the increasing supply of arms and
djounoud
, particularly from the sanctuary of Tunisia. The rotund and aggressive “Bébé-lune” Lacoste was charged with speeding through the project of a
loi-cadre
for Algeria, initiated under the Mollet regime and now to be promulgated before the new autumn session of the United Nations, which threatened to be embarrassing for France.

The first attempt to provide Algeria with a political statute since the abortive one of 1947, the
loi-cadre
, which bore some affinity to the Lauriol Plan, prescribed a degree of autonomy for Algeria, with the country divided into between eight and ten self-governing territories. Each territory would have its own separate assembly proportionately representative (by and large) of the racial majority in that territory. Eventually the territories would be united, once overall peace was restored, presumably under Muslim majority rule. Apart from introducing a multiplicity of legislators and bureaucrats, the immediate weakness of the
loi-cadre
was that, to fill these legislatory seats, it would depend essentially on men of good will of the “third force”, European and Muslim, who by now had become all but nonexistent. From the Muslim point of view, whereas in 1947 the
loi-cadre
might have been acceptable to a majority of moderate nationalists, and possibly even in 1954, by 1957 it was once more the old story of too little, too late, and promptly it received an unyielding “No” from the F.L.N. The
pied noir
attitude was, as always, that it threatened the integrity of French territory and that in any case there could be no talk of a political solution until the rebellion had been finally stamped out; and, of course, a Muslim-controlled legislature would be intolerable. Lacoste’s popularity, momentarily high after the winning of the Battle of Algiers, slumped to zero. On 18 September a general strike was threatened in Algiers—this time by the
pieds noirs
—but was firmly suppressed by Massu and his paras. But, as usual, the
pied noir
refrain was taken up in Paris, and on the 30th the
loi-cadre
was rejected by the Assembly on a 279 to 253 vote, with Jacques Soustelle now playing a lead role in its defeat. Viewed in retrospect, the vote might well have represented the last chance of finding an Algerian solution within a French framework.

The defeat of the
loi-cadre
brought with it the fall of the Bourgès-Maunoury government and came a step closer to the demise of the Fourth Republic. There now ensued a leaderless crisis lasting thirty-five days. First Mollet, then Pleven, followed by Pinay, Robert Schuman and finally Mollet again, tried unsuccessfully to form governments. A wave of disgust with politicians as a whole such as had not been seen since the 1930s flowed across the country. Prices escalated, and strike after strike—the railways and métros, the posts and telegraphs, and electricity—paralysed the country. Finally Félix Gaillard, Bourgès-Maunoury’s successful Finance Minister, accepted the unenviable mandate on 5 November. It was his thirty-eighth birthday, which made him the youngest of all the Fourth Republic’s Premiers—and the last but one. On the 29th he miraculously succeeded in getting the Assembly to pass the
loi-cadre
, but severely trimmed so as to meet
pied noir
fears of being submerged by the Muslim majority, and thus making it even less acceptable to the latter. In London, in December, Prime Minister Macmillan noted in his journal: “France was back in a self-critical and hopeless mood, which expressed itself (as I had known so well in de Gaulle’s time) by being as tiresome as possible to everyone else.” This was a tiresomeness with which he would very soon be reacquainted.

Oil under the Sahara

In this mood of “hopelessness”, and amid the last expiring “convulsions of this absurd ballet”, as de Gaulle so scathingly dubbed the gyrations of the Fourth Republic, France—just like Britain in the bleak mid-1970s, reaching out desperately for her panacea under the North Sea—saw one transcending glimmer of hope. On 7 January 1958 the stopcocks opened at Hassi-Messaoud deep in the sands of the Algerian Sahara, and its first oil flowed towards France. Already in 1945 French oil companies had begun prospecting in the Sahara, and shortly after the beginning of the Algerian war a major strike was made at Edjelé on the Libyan frontier. With the opening up of the Hassi-Messaoud field, French oilmen predicted euphorically that they had at their fingertips resources similar to those of the Middle East.[
1
] From 5 million tons in the first year, 1958, it was reckoned production would reach 14 million in 1962, and that it would suffice to satisfy all France’s oil requirements by 1980. With the menace that Suez presented to Middle East oil supplies, here was a glowing prospect of securing the nation’s need for the future, as well as solving her acute balance of payments problem. Quite quietly, France now found herself with a new motive for winning the Algerian war that went far beyond any consideration for the one million
pieds noirs
. During a private visit to the Sahara in March 1957, de Gaulle declared to French oilmen: “Here is the great opportunity for our country that you have brought into the world; in our destiny, this can change everything….” Though, earlier, he had confided gloomily to Raymond Tournoux: “You watch, the regime will lose the Sahara. It will also lose Alsace-Lorraine. Only the Auvergne will remain to us, because nobody will want it…!”