A Savage War of Peace Read online

  Messali versus Abbas

  To some extent, this gap was filled by the “revolutionaries” of Messali Hadj.[7] Born in 1898, the son of a shoemaker from Tlemcen near the Moroccan border, Messali received little formal education; he served in 1914–1918 in the French army, and then went to work in France. Here he married a Frenchwoman, who brought him for a short period into the ranks of the Communist Party (but the role played by the P.C.A. in the repressions at Sétif finally caused him to break with the Communists), Always studiously dressed in the traditional attire of djellaba and red fez, with his broad face and vigorous beard, Messali was an imposing figure and an inflammatory orator. A journalist of Le Monde visiting him in 1952 was reminded of “Rasputin of 1916, Gapon of 1905… a magus, a prophet, a miracle-worker”. In 1927 Messali became president of a political grouping recently formed from Algerian workers in the Paris area, called the Étoile Nord-Africaine, which under his lead soon became the most radical of all the nationalist organisations. Through the working-class origins of both Messali and its founding members, the Étoile came to have a proletarian character superimposed over its nationalist and religious doctrines. It differed from the Ulema both in a more modernistic interpretation of Islamic dogma and in its social demands, which included the redistribution of land among the fellahs. Much of Messali’s ideals of popularist socialism was later to be inherited by the F.L.N. and present-day Algeria. By 1933 Messali was already talking of “revolution”, and the Étoile programme declared for universal suffrage in Algeria, “a struggle for the total independence” of all three Maghreb nations, and confiscation of all property acquired by the French government or colons. Messali’s revolutionary zeal was to bring him several spells in prison or exile, and make him — until the outbreak of the war in 1954 — the best known of all the Algerian nationalist leaders. The Étoile was dissolved, then recreated by Messali in 1937 as the Parti Progressiste Algérien (P.P.A.), with roughly the same platform but concentrating its activities on Algeria alone; after 1945 the P.P.A. — banned again — assumed the more dramatic title of Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (M.T.L.D.).

  The third strand of Algerian nationalism in the inter-war period, the liberal movement, is less easy to reduce to party terms than the other two, but can perhaps best be studied through the person of its central figure, Ferhat Abbas. His whole career is one of utmost relevance in this story, for it was symptomatic of how the liberal moderate — through successive disillusions — becomes superseded by the revolutionary extremist. Born in 1899, Abbas, like Ben Badis, originated from the Constantine area, but his father, unlike Messali’s, had risen from being the son of a fellah to be a caid and Commander of the Legion of Honour. To Abbas, his father’s career exemplified how the best of the French colonial system could be exploited to the advantage of the Muslim, and he himself rose successfully through the ranks of legislative posts that were open to him. He did his secondary studies at a French lycée in Constantine, then adopted the profession of pharmacist[8] in Sétif. Everything about Abbas was orientated towards the West, specifically France, and a bourgeois France at that. Linguistically, he never felt as at home in Arabic as he did in French, which he spoke with great skill and charm. He divorced his Muslim wife, and then, like Messali, married a Frenchwoman — a marriage that in itself was symbolic of his divided loyalties between France and Islam, where he could not support puritanical zeal to the same extent as Sheikh Ben Badis. In the Second World War, at the age of forty, Abbas promptly enlisted in the French army, but never received a commission.

  It was during his time at Algiers university, however, that Abbas was first influenced by nationalist sentiment, through contact with other young évolués like himself. As president of the Muslim Students Association he entered the political arena and began ardently to pursue a goal of Franco-Algerian equality. Of pacific temperament, although he was a skilful debater, he was no rabble-rouser like Messali, and he and the proletarian supporters of Messali felt mutually ill at ease. To them, remarks one French writer: “he was a little like the cousin who had gone up to the big city, educated himself, and succeeded, but having forgotten his origins”. With his clipped moustache, long, cultured features and neatly sober dress, Abbas was the essence of the westernised, middle-class Arab évolué — and so were the majority of his followers. Until relatively late in his career he was a passionate protagonist of assimilation — in equality — with metropolitan France, and unlike Messali and Ben Badis he did not believe in an Algeria with a separate identity. In a much-quoted passage, he declared in 1936:

  Had I discovered the Algerian nation, I would be a nationalist and I would not blush as if I had committed a crime.… However, I will not die for the Algerian nation, because it does not exist. I have not found it. I have examined History, I questioned the living and the dead, I visited cemeteries; nobody spoke to me about it. I then turned to the Koran and I sought for one solitary verse forbidding a Muslim from integrating himself with a non-Muslim nation. I did not find that either. One cannot build on the wind.

  Two months later Ben Badis riposted fierily that he and the Ulema sages had also “examined History”, and had indeed discovered a “Muslim Algerian nation”, which “has its culture, its traditions and its characteristics, good or bad like every other nation of the earth. And, next, we state that this Algerian nation is not France, cannot be France, and does not wish to be France.”

  The schism within the nationalist movement was wide open, a prelude to those that were to plague the Algerian revolutionary movement throughout its existence. In June 1936 a “Muslim Congress” was convened in Algiers for the first time, but the display of unity it produced was short-lived. The Blum-Viollette proposals of the same year themselves provided the root cause of a fresh split. While Ferhat Abbas and the liberals warmly welcomed them, they were attacked by Messali in violent terms as “a new instrument of colonialism aimed at dividing the Algerian people, by the usual French methods of separating the élite from the masses”.

  When the Blum-Viollette Bill collapsed, however, an impossible predicament confronted the liberals: on the one hand, they saw themselves looked on as renegades by Messali and the Ulema; on the other, they were rejected by the French. It was a bitter personal disillusion for Abbas, who, from this moment, began to move away from the ideal of assimilation towards some form of autonomy for Algeria. Thus, at least ideologically, he and his supporters were brought a long step closer to the “revolutionaries” — a progression, tragic for France, that was to be repeated each time “moderate” Algerian nationalists found their overtures repulsed by the government of France, or by the pied noir lobbies. Modest as were the reforms it would have introduced, the abortion of the Blum-Viollette Bill undoubtedly marked a vital turning-point for the Algerian nationalist movement. At the same time it also bestowed on the pieds noirs a first dangerous awareness that they could call the tune on any reform initiated by a government in Paris.

  Impact of the Second World War

  The Second World War came, and with it France’s crushing defeat in 1940. To Muslim minds, particularly sensitive to prestige and baraka,[9] the humiliation made a deep impression. The reaction of many was: “France has had it; so why not pay our taxes to the Germans, instead of to France?” For the pieds noirs, circumstances were austere but not impossible: “there were restrictions, shortage of oil, and chickens on the balconies to lay eggs. Life was tolerable, we all more or less had a photograph of the Maréchal in the dining-room, but simply because he had a fine head of an old man,” recalls a Jewish resident of Algiers. But discrepancies with the Muslim population were marked; economic severance from the mother country, with its 100,000 Algerian wage-earners there, and successive famines caused standards of living to sink acutely. As Harold Macmillan noted in his wartime memoirs:

  It is as if the Irishmen in the U.S.A. and Great Britain were to cease sending money home, and at the same time no Irish labour was going over to England for the harvest, etc
., and earning money in that way.

  The population is therefore very poor, and the food and clothing position among the people has caused us all a lot of worry.

  On top of the humiliation of defeat was compounded the confusion of not knowing what authority represented the true France. After 1940, while the French colonies in Equatorial Africa went over to de Gaulle, Algeria remained pro-Vichy; thus, within three years, Algerians found their loyalty invoked first to Pétain, then to Darlan, then Giraud and finally de Gaulle. But even after the rise to eminence of de Gaulle, it was the shadow of the Allied colossus in the background that constantly obscured the rekindled, feeble light of the présence française in Algeria. Landing — once again at Sidi-Ferruch — in November 1942, the Anglo-Americans with their overwhelming weight of war material and the power and riches that this implied, in contrast to the puny resources of the Vichy French, made a powerful impact on the Algerian nationalists. They were also soon aware of the anti-colonialist creed of Roosevelt’s America, and Abbas had several meetings with Bob Murphy, the President’s personal representative in Algiers, to explore the possibility of applying the Atlantic Charter to Algeria.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  [5] The Algerian equivalent of pasha.

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ici, c’est la France

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

  Edmund Burke, On Conciliation with America, 1775

  The country

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

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

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

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