A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (48 page)

Torture and the French conscience

What above all else, however, most potently imprinted the war upon the French consciousness, and conscience, were the revelations of torture that multiplied as the Battle of Algiers got under way. Revisiting France towards the end of 1956, a
pied noir
psychiatrist friend of Dr Frantz Fanon and fellow sympathiser with the F.L.N., Charles Geromini, noted with disgust how

The Parisians cared for nothing but their outings, their theatres, their vacations prepared three months in advance. I came to detest them, to despise all those French who were sending their sons to torture in Algeria and who could only be interested in their little boutiques….

But this was far from being entirely accurate, or fair. From January 1955 onwards François Mauriac, in the “Bloc-Notes” which he contributed for Servan-Schreiber’s
L’Express
, had been hammering away at army excesses in Algeria, and had acquired a widening measure of support. In February 1957
Témoignage Chrétien
published the “Muller Dossier”, compiled by a
rappelé
killed in Algeria in which he and fourteen of his comrades denounced “degrading practices” they had witnessed. Another organ of Catholic protest against torture was the Comité de Résistance Spirituelle, founded among others by the popular Abbé Pierre. Then appeared Captain Pierre-Henri Simon’s book,
Contre la Torture
. Simon was a Catholic writer who had spent five years in prisoner-of-war camps during the Second World War; shortly after his release he had visited Belsen and, shocked by the rejection of responsibility by the local Germans, he had said to himself, “May the good people of France never fall into such a moral degradation of this order!” Though Simon was in no way an apostle of withdrawal from Algeria, his book listed malpractices witnessed there, sternly denouncing them as well as the collective culpability of the army and nation at large. Also in 1957 appeared, with considerable
éclat
, Servan-Schreiber’s own book,
Lieutenant en Algérie
, followed in 1958 by Alleg’s
La Question
, with its harrowing account of his torture and the disappearance of Maurice Audin. A Comité Audin, formed as a consequence, persistently attacked similar cases of malpractice throughout the rest of the Algerian war. Although members of the Left liked to claim sole proprietary rights on the anti-torture campaign—often to further political aims—the refrain was also taken up by such papers as
Le Monde
(which, later in 1957, published the critical report of the Safeguard Commission formed under pressure from Teitgen) and
Le Figaro
.

As other countries have discovered since (not least Britain), it is always easier to be coolly censorious about the excesses of the forces of order when one is happily far removed from the tragic sights of the outrages, and unaffected by the horrors of mutilated children and pretty girls. Nevertheless, in March, disclosure of the “suicide” first of Ben M’hidi then of Ali Boumendjel provoked a major outrage in France. Boumendjel, the young Algerian lawyer, had been a popular figure at the Paris Bar with many French friends, and on hearing of his death his former mentor, René Capitant, Professor of Public Law at the University of Paris, informed the Minister of Education that he was suspending his courses. Next came the Bollardière “affair”, with various members of the Mollet government—including Pineau, Mitterrand and Defferre—coming forward to defend the general sentenced to sixty days’ arrest for his “revolt”. There was further publicity when the writer and Resistance hero, Vercors, posted his Legion of Honour back to President Coty. All these pressures led Mollet to get up in the Assembly and, by subtle implication, dissociate himself from the excesses of Massu’s paras, and in May he had instituted the Safeguard Commission. It was not only public revelations that brought the “gangrene” of torture home to France; the young men who had been forced to administer it brought it back in their own persons, profoundly—and often permanently—marked by their experiences. Vidal-Naquet quotes a letter from a young soldier:

They used to ask for volunteers to finish off the guys who had been tortured (there are no marks left that way and so no danger of a witch-hunt later). I didn’t like the idea—you know how it is—shooting a chap a hundred yards off in battle—that’s nothing, because the guy’s some way off and you can hardly see him. And anyway he’s armed and can either shoot back or buzz off. But finishing off a defenceless guy just like that—No!…[but he finally yielded]…He looked at me. I can see his eyes looking at me now. The whole thing revolted me. I fired. The other chaps finished off the rest. After that it wasn’t so bad, but the first time…I tell you that turned me up….

Vidal-Naquet also notes a poll conducted in 1960 by
La Vie Catholique
in which, in answer to the question “what has been the reader’s worst experience” in Algeria, 126 referred to the hardships of war as such; whereas 132 specified atrocities committed by the French, or acts of torture heard about, witnessed, or participated in; against only six who had cited their own wounds.

A distinguished member of the Safeguard Commission, Robert Delavignette, wrote prophetically at the end of 1957:

That which is true for Algeria may very soon be true for France…. The most serious problem is not the atrocities themselves, but that as a result of them the state is engaged in a process of self-destruction. What we are witnessing in Algeria is nothing short of the disintegration of the state; it is a gangrene which threatens France herself….

Yet, against this, what was surely a most healthy sign of the moral integrity of the French nation as a whole was the unremitting breadth of protest aroused by torture. Vidal-Naquet, himself a declared opponent of the established government, admits freely that “no country involved in similar horrors has ever permitted publication of such complete documentation on the subject”. The vehemence of the public outcry, however, was also to have its repercussions in other directions. Army generals like General Allard, corps commander for the Algiers area and Massu’s immediate superior, themselves immaculate of any reproach of association with torture, protested bitterly to the Ministry of Defence against the anti-army attacks in the Press. Their “incessant repetition”, he wrote, “places at risk the morale of the army”. All through the army in Algeria, and, of course, particularly among the paras who saw themselves as the principal target of such attacks, there was an increasingly savage feeling that they had been called in to carry out the dirty work of the civil authorities and were now being carted for it. Once again the plaint, “
On nous a fait le coup
”, began to be heard in the messes. It was yet another brick in the wall of resentment and contempt rapidly rising against the politicians of the Fourth Republic.

Growth of anti-war faction

“Up to 1956,” says Dorothy Pickles, “the only point on which virtually the whole of France was united was that Algerian independence was unthinkable and unmentionable.” From 1957 onwards the torture controversy, the forcing of issues into the limelight through the Battle of Algiers, coupled with the unsettling effect on public opinion of feeble oscillations in the Algerian policy of successive governments, and a certain degree of ennui with the whole business, led to an increasing variety of dissentient voices. In February 1957, for instance, the august
Le Monde
had intoned against the breaking of the F.L.N.-sponsored general strike, declaring: “The right to strike is an essential right in the aggregate of fundamental democratic liberties.” But, much as they might disagree on the means employed, the overwhelming, not so silent majority of the metropolitan French still held—and would continue to hold—the belief that independence for Algeria was “unthinkable and unmentionable”. Even the powerful Communist bloc had frequently sided in the Assembly with the extreme Right and the “Algiers lobby” to thwart reformist measures of the government of the day.

Perhaps not untypical of the growing divisions in French society were those within the Left, where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had split with their venerated friend and ally, Camus, whom many had taken to be the hero, “Henri”, of her great post-war novel,
Les Mandarins
. Condemning even-handedly the atrocities committed by both sides, Camus (in what was a thinly-veiled criticism of the more violently militant supporters of the F.L.N.) had attacked “a section of our opinion” which “thinks obscurely that the Arabs have acquired the right somehow to slit throats and to mutilate”. Still declaring himself fundamentally opposed to any policy of independence leading to “the eviction of 1,200,000 Europeans from Algeria”, by the beginning of 1958 he had come out in favour of a federalist solution, as recently propounded by a liberal professor of law at Algiers University, Marc Lauriol. The Lauriol Plan envisaged a federation within the framework of the French Commonwealth similar to the Swiss cantonal system. A newly constituted French parliament would be divided into two sections, the second of which would consist, in direct proportion to the two races in Algeria, of some hundred Muslim representatives to fifteen
pieds noirs
, and would have a complete say on anything to do with strictly Muslim affairs; both “sections” together, containing a representative majority of metropolitan French, would legislate on all matters concerning France and Algeria jointly. Like most such liberal schemes for Algeria, the Lauriol Plan might well have proved acceptable to moderate Muslims four years earlier, but was totally unacceptable to the
pieds noirs
. If such a solution were not now adopted, Camus concluded sombrely and prophetically, “Algeria will be lost and the consequences terrible, for the Arabs as for the French. This is the last warning that can be formulated, before lapsing into silence once more, by a writer dedicated over the past twenty years to the service of Algeria.” The impatience of the Sartre-Beauvoir team at the liberalism of Camus (and, for that matter, of Germaine Tillion too) now overflowed. Already Simone de Beauvoir had been angered by his “civil truce” initiative of 1956 and later growled, “the humanist in him had given way to the
pied noir”
. The final blow had come with Camus’ statement on receiving the Nobel Prize (in 1957): “I love justice; but I will fight for my mother before justice.” She was “revolted”.

To Simone de Beauvoir and her world, the sight of French uniforms in the streets had by early 1958 come to have

the same effect on me that swastikas once did…those boys in their camouflaged battle uniforms, smiling and parading with bronzed faces and clean hands; those hands.……Yes, I was living in an occupied city, and I loathed the occupiers even more fiercely than I had those others in the forties….

Those who went quite so far in their passionate opposition to the war and their support for the F.L.N. were still in a tiny minority; those who stood basically for
Algérie francaise
were still in the huge majority; yet, by 1958, there was absolutely no mistaking the awareness of the war that had now come to roost in France.

The F.L.N. comes to France

There was yet another factor in this awareness, and possibly the only one that had been directly fostered by the F.L.N. This was its strategy of physically extending the war to the mother country; as, indeed, the I.R.A. were to follow in its footsteps in 1972. Already, in the early months of the Revolution, Simone de Beauvoir had recorded in her diary a change in external appearances of the Algerians in her neighbourhood:

Leather-jacketed North Africans, looking very well-groomed, began to frequent the Café des Amis; all alcohol was forbidden; through the windows I could see the customers sitting down in front of glasses of milk. No more brawls at night. This discipline had been imposed by the F.L.N. militants.

Progressively, the F.L.N. had indeed begun to impose discipline upon the some four hundred thousand Algerian workers in metropolitan France. In November 1954 Messali’s M.N.A. was strongly entrenched among this Algerian proletariat, particularly in the Paris region, and if there were still “brawls at night” these were generally an extension of the vendetta from Algeria, a settling of accounts between the F.L.N. and M.N.A. At first, it seemed as if the initiative lay with the M.N.A., but swiftly the F.L.N.—with its superior organisation—assumed the upper hand. Acting under the innocent-sounding name of the Fédération de France, the F.L.N. employed methods similar to those in Algeria: the collection of funds under pressure and threats from café and hotel owners, pimps and shopkeepers, as well as down to even the poorer manual workers; and the selective elimination of informers, M.N.A. cell-leaders, and “friends of France”.

Up to the beginning of the Battle of Algiers, all specifically French targets had been assiduously eschewed. Then, in January 1957, Mohamed Lebjaoui was despatched to France to hot up the war there. Lebjaoui, it will be remembered, was the bourgeois “liberal” who had infiltrated Camus’ “civil truce” movement in 1956 and already the previous year he had been pressing his friend Abane to launch a campaign in France “to lead French liberals to understand our struggle”. Apart from intensifying the collection of funds, recruitment and the “acquiring” of Algerian officers in the French army (where Lebjaoui says his organisation was “spectacularly” successful), his orders were to set on foot a system of eye for an eye reprisals to avenge the death of any Muslim civilians in Algeria; and, finally, to effect the speedy “liquidation” of Messali Hadj himself. Lebjaoui says that he himself objected to both these measures, and in fact he was never to have the opportunity of implementing them. Instead, he says, his aim was “to carry the war to France, so that the French should discover just how painful the war was”. By destroying métros and bus stations, they would “make the Parisian people go on foot, without killing a single person. I also wanted to burn down a forest for every one destroyed by the army in Algeria. But”, he added, chuckling, “I am glad that I was arrested—perhaps otherwise I might not now be able to walk in the Bois de Boulogne!” (In fact, Lebjaoui was grabbed by the Paris police at the end of February, after less than two months’ activity. He then set to organising the F.L.N. within the French prisons, but in all probability much exaggerated his own importance.