A Savage War of Peace Read online

  Undeniably, however, much of the land colonised by the pieds noirs had been carved out of insalubrious wilderness, some of which may have been used as migratory grazing grounds, rather than grabbed directly from Muslim farmers. This was especially true of the mosquito-ridden marshes of the Mitidja, inland from Algiers. Its reputation in the early colonial days was so bad that anyone with a face rendered sallow by fever was said to have a “Boufarik complexion”, but under French expertise it was rapidly to become Algeria’s richest farming area. In 1843, Trappist monks introduced the vine to the Mitidja; thirty-five years later the coming of phylloxera to France launched the Algerian wine industry, and by the mid-twentieth century it had grown to be one of the Mediterranean’s biggest producers. Thus in the all-important realm of agriculture, as indeed in that of industrial development later, the colons could reasonably claim that they had created the country out of virtually nothing. But it was the old, old story of the Europeans with their superior technique, resources and aggressive vigour progressively assimilating the best lands, while at the same time the more numerous indigènes were being pushed out on to the more peripheral lands.

  During the first forty years of the présence française Algeria was chiefly run by the military; administration at the local level being in the hands of the Bureaux Arabes created by Marshal Bugeaud. These were adapted from the Turkish system, except that plenipotentiary powers resided with the French administrator, who combined the roles of governor, judge, inspector of taxes, technical adviser and welfare officer. Often these came to be highly expert in their field, as well as deeply dedicated to the welfare of the people under their charge. By 1870, however, the pied noir population had risen to over 200,000 and an uprising against the military-style administration forced Paris to grant them greater control over their affairs and something more closely resembling the forms of government enjoyed by metropolitan Frenchmen. The institutions that then evolved were to remain, with little basic change, over the next eighty and more years. At the top, Algeria — since it had been annexed as an integral part of France — was governed through the French Ministry of the Interior. This was in sharp contrast to its closely related Maghreb[3] neighbours, over whom France established only “protectorates” during the nineteenth century and which were consequently dealt with by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thus it would always prove difficult to formulate any co-ordinated policy for the Maghreb as a whole, and in fact such disparate territories as French West Africa and Indo-China came to have more homogeneous links through both being subordinated to the same Ministry of the Colonies.

  Appointed by, and responsible to, the Minister of the Interior was the governor-general, one of the most senior functionaries of the French republic. By unwritten tradition he was never a pied noir, any more than the prefect of Corsica was a Corsican. Directly under him came the prefects of Algiers, Oran and Constantine; which, as departments of France, were entitled to send senators and deputies to the mother parliament in Paris. Originally only the pied noir population enjoyed the right to vote for these representatives. Then came the creation of the double electoral college system; the first college consisting of all “French citizens”, plus a modest proportion of select Muslims, the number of which was augmented over regular intervals — though at a painfully slow rate; the second embracing the whole Muslim population. Each college (in 1946) could elect eight senators and fifteen deputies to the National Assembly. In effect this meant that one million Europeans had voting rights equal to those of over eight million Muslims. Laws specifically relating to Algeria were adapted or initiated by a “regime of decrees” established in 1834, controlled by the administration and thus escaping any parliamentary control. The nearest semblance to any Algerian legislative assembly was the Délégations Financières, composed of mixed European and Muslim members, but the competence of this body was strictly limited to budgetary matters; and, in practice, for one reason or another it tended to reflect the interests of the grands colons.

  At lower levels — although the vast, empty Saharan territories continued under military control — the administration was divided between communes de plein exercice and communes mixtes. The former were established in communities where Europeans predominated (though there were some glaring exceptions, such as Constantine, where the Muslims were in an overwhelming majority), and they were based on the French model with a ruling mayor (invariably European) and an elected municipal council, three-fifths of whose seats were reserved for Europeans. The communes mixtes held sway in the areas where the Muslims had clear numerical superiority, and each was headed by an appointed European administrator, governing through the medium of local caids — all of whom derived their office through the governor-general.

  The institution of the commune mixte contained many of the elements of what, by the mid-twentieth century, was most unsatisfactory about French rule in Algeria. It was, in fact, an adaptation in modern dress of Père Bugeaud’s Bureaux Arabes, which had worked well enough in the early days, but it was simply not equipped to cope with either the advanced technical problems of the twentieth century or its vastly expanded Muslim populations. It is revealing that, whereas in 1922 there were 300 European administrators for the communes mixtes for three million Muslims governed by them, by 1954 the ratio had shifted to 257 for four and a half million. At Arris, for instance, the epicentre of the 1954 revolt in the Aurès, one administrator and two assistants were in charge of 60,000 dispersed over a wide and inaccessible area. The fault lay, to a large extent, with French policy which — possibly out of fear of releasing a genie from the bottle — had consistently shied away from creating an indigenous administrative corps. A passing comparison could be made with India, where, after a long participation in government, by the time of the British devolution of power in 1947 something like half of the civil service was “Indianised”.[4] In contrast, by as late as 1956 — two years after the Algerian war had broken out — Governor-General Lacoste admitted that no more than eight out of 864 higher administrative posts were held by Muslims; and it was not until 1959, after the coming of de Gaulle, that the French army could proudly announce the appointment of the first Muslim regimental commander. Though often excellent and dedicated men in themselves, the French (or frequently pied noir) administrators tended to become an ingrowing race. As Professor Émile-Félix Gautier, a distinguished scholar and fervent admirer of Algérie française, wrote at the time of the 1930 centenary:

  The administrative career in Algeria has been a closed shop; the official enters at the beginning of his life to become later, if he succeeds, a director with grey hair; he doesn’t leave it; normally no door opens on to other French or colonial administrations. The result is that the Government-General is permeated by an Algerian [i.e. pied noir] spirit.

  The “cadi’s ear”

  Paradoxically, the advent of modern communications meant that the over-worked administrator became more, rather than less, out of contact with his flock; he communicated by telephone instead of riding out by horseback, as in the good old days, to stay overnight in the various douars. Many inhabitants in the remoter mountains of the Aurès and Kabylia never saw a European in their lives, their sole contact with France being through a caid, bachaga[5] or the hated local tax-collector. More and more the administrator came to rely on these Muslim intermediaries; some were venerable and honourable old men, laden with decorations, who had fought for France, or served her loyally and with integrity; others owed their position purely to family and tradition, and were known contemptuously by young nationalists as the Beni-Oui-Oui, the rubber stamps of French policy; still others were appallingly corrupt. In the Turkish tradition, the bribe was all too often an indispensable fact of life. Jean Servier, a well-known French ethnologist, describes his outrage when an elderly illiterate produced a piece of paper stating that a local Muslim judge, or cadi,[6] was charging him 2,000 (old) francs ($6) for obtaining a copy of his marriage certificate, plus “scribal expenses, 1,000 francs”.

>   “That’s not the normal fee,” I told him, “France does not charge so much for justice.”

  “The cadi assures us nevertheless, that it is France which obliges us to pay so much money.”

  He added with a knowing smile. “Among our people there is a large cake called ‘the cadi’s ear’ — because it requires a lot of honey to sweeten it!”

  The “sweetening” often descended to the level of sheer swindle; 100,000 to 200,000 francs for a Legion of Honour or a post of caid, which might never materialise; or a desert sheikh who would bully the government into digging at great expense artesian wells to provide poverty-stricken fellahs with a living — these would prove to be dry and investigation would reveal that the arid land had in fact been sold (again, at great expense) to the Government by the said sheikh. The capacity (and ingenuity) of the “cadi’s ear” seemed boundless; it increased hand in hand with the gulf between the French rulers and the ruled in Algeria — and so did resentment.

  There was an important additional anomaly that provoked bitterness whenever the bona fides of “assimilation” with the mother country were questioned. This was the issue of French citizenship. Muslims were automatically French “subjects”, but not French “citizens”. From the early days legislation had permitted them to be subject to Islamic, as opposed to French, law; this may have been designed as a cultural and religious protection, but it became in effect a prison, because a Muslim wishing to adopt French citizenship had to renounce these rights, thereby virtually committing an act of apostasy. Moreover, in practice many obstacles were placed in the path of the Muslim seeking French citizenship. Back in 1871 tribesmen reporting in front of a judge at Bougie to fill in naturalisation papers were, reportedly, thrown into prison — pour encourager les autres. As a result, by 1936, after seventy-five years of “assimilation”, no more than 2,500 Muslims had actually crossed the bar to French citizenship. There were two further inconsistencies. To begin with, in having imposed upon them by the French the Arab judicial system, the Berber Kabyles had been made to accept a social structure that had been alien to them in the first place. Secondly, in 1870 the Crémieux Decrees had made the exception of conferring automatic French citizenship upon the whole Jewish community of Algeria. Here, for Muslims, was a constantly open wound: why should the Jewish minority be open to political privileges denied to the indigenous majority?

  Attempts at reform

  Before Sétif, various attempts had been made at political and social reform — in 1868, 1919 and 1944. By and large they had followed a dismally stereotyped pattern; initiated by metropolitan French governments, frustrated by pied noir pressure-groups. In 1914–1918 Algerian troops fighting alongside the French had suffered appalling casualties of 25,000 killed out of 173,000 joining the colours. By way of recognition of their courage and loyalty legislation was introduced in 1919 to facilitate Muslim access (in modest numbers) to French citizenship. It aroused the most intransigent and violent opposition from the pieds noirs, reluctant or fearful of change, typical of which was this expostulation by the senator from Oran. “The indigènes have fulfilled their duty vis-à-vis ourselves and deserve to be recompensed. But to do this, is it necessary to resort to imprudent measures?” The same kind of smug, myopic reliance upon Muslim “duty” and docility was abundantly evident at the lavish and self-congratulatory centenary celebrations of the conquest in 1930, which included a re-enactment of the landing at Sidi-Ferruch. At one of the many such ceremonies one Beni-Oui-Oui bachaga was heard to declare that if the Muslims had known the French in 1830 as they now knew them, “they would have loaded their muskets with flowers”; while another proclaimed that the legions of his countrymen who had died in the First World War in the cause of the “civilising work of France in Algeria” had atoned for the French killed in 1830.

  The centenary of the conquest was indeed a glittering colonial occasion reminiscent of the British Raj in India at its peak, and showed evidence on every hand of the genuine, and remarkable, benefits that France had bestowed on Algeria in so many fields over the preceding hundred years. Summing up, a British writer, Mary Motley, wrote: “In the golden glow of the centenary there seemed no reason why the existing regime should not last indefinitely.” This optimism, however, was far from being shared by Maurice Viollette, who had been one of France’s most visionary governor-generals. Deeply aware of the stirrings of discontent beneath the then apparently placid surface of Algeria, he issued this prophetic warning the year after the centenary: “before twenty years are up we will know the gravest of difficulties in North Africa”. Five years later, Viollette succeeded in getting a set of liberal reforms tabled by the Assembly, the Blum—Viollette Bill. His declared ideal was that “Muslim students, while remaining Muslim, should become so French in their education, that no Frenchman, however deeply racist and religiously prejudiced he might be… will any longer dare to deny them French fraternity”. It spelt, in one word, “assimilation”. The provisions of his bill, however, were once again extremely modest, notably offering citizenship to no more than 25,000 (out of some six million) Muslims, without renouncing their statutory rights to Islamic law. It would have been one of the most impressive pieces of legislation by Leon Blum’s Popular Front, then in power. But the well-oiled mechanism of pied noir protest began to run; the Algerian Press fulminated against the “explosive situation” provoked by Parisian ignorance; the anciens combattants marched through the streets; the mayors threatened to resign; the powerful lobbies in Paris burrowed away. “We will never tolerate that in even the smallest commune an Arab might be mayor” was a not untypical pied noir reaction. Under pressure at home and the threat of Hitler abroad, Leon Blum’s Popular Front hesitated, and finally collapsed before the bill could be passed. A bitterly disillusioned Viollette said to the Assembly in an eloquent warning that has been variously quoted:

  When the Muslims protest, you are indignant; when they approve, you are suspicious; when they keep quiet you are fearful. Messieurs, these men have no political nation. They do not even demand their religious nation. All they ask is to be admitted into yours. If you refuse this, beware lest they do not soon create one for themselves.

  The still-born Blum—Viollette Bill was the ultimate plea for “assimilation”. It aroused the most glowing hopes among Muslim liberals, but when — like every other endeavour of reform between 1909 and 1954 — it was thwarted, they were replaced by black despair.

  Growth of nationalism

  Back in 1894 Jules Cambon, then governor-general, wrote to the Senate describing the consequences of the French policy of breaking up the great traditional families of Algieria,

  because we found them to be forces of resistance. We did not realise that in suppressing the forces of resistance in this fashion, we were also suppressing our means of action. The result is that we are today confronted by a sort of human dust on which we have no influence and in which movements take place which are to us unknown.

  It was a profound and far-sighted analysis. When France, in extremis between 1954 and 1962, was to cast around for interlocuteurs valables, moderate nationalist representatives with whom compromise solutions might be negotiated, among this “human dust” she was to find virtually none. On the other hand, from earliest days the colonial structure had so functioned as to impede and obviate the emergence of any concerted Muslim opposition body, and for long years it succeeded marvellously; yet again, when the ultimate disaster did occur, France would be taken by surprise, because — for the reasons suggested by Cambon — the resistance movements would be “unknown”.

  Because of Algeria’s unique status as an integral part of France, which cut it off from undercurrents of Arab nationalism in the outside world more than its neighbours, one cannot easily state — as with other colonial territories — at what precise point a “resistance movement” began. In broad terms, three separate strands of Algerian nationalism have been defined, each identified with a particular leader. There was the religious movement, as embodi
ed by the Association des Ulema of Sheikh Abdulhamid Ben Badis; the revolutionaries following Messali Hadj; and finally the liberals of Ferhat Abbas. Over the past century of French rule, French education and French culture, Muslim scholars consider that it was the religious doctrine which, more than anything, had kept alight the fires of nationalism in Algeria, and — although they were not the first in the field — it was probably the Ulema (founded in 1931) that provided the nationalists with their first momentum. Certainly their philosophic influence was of primary and inestimable significance, even remaining very much of a force in present-day Algeria. A Berber from Constantine descended from a family with centuries of tradition in political and religious leadership, Ben Badis was an ascetic and deeply conservative theologian who believed that Algerian regeneration could only be achieved by a return to the first principles of Islam. He remains the only one of the early nationalists who is still regarded as something of a national hero by most Algerians today. In their puritanism of outlook, the Ulema perhaps most resembled the Wahabi sect which, under Ibn Saud, had swept through the Arabian peninsula from the early 1900s onwards. They rigorously condemned alcohol, tobacco, dancing, music and sport, and one of their principal targets was the marabouts — or holy men and leaders of mystic orders — whom they accused both of corrupting the faith by their espousal of mysticism and of being the “domestic animals of colonialism”. The Ulema also campaigned, with patriotic motives, for the separation of church and state; their programme was cultural as well as religious; and in schools set up widely across the country the values of Arabic as a language, of Algeria as a national entity and of pan-Arabism as an ideal were pressed home with considerable effect. Stated in all simplicity, their creed was: “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my country.… Independence is a natural right for every people of the earth.…” The Ulema did more than any other body to rekindle a sense of religious and national consciousness among Algerians, but, tied up in their own theological coils, they failed to find pragmatic applications of their doctrines.