Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (58 page)

France’s post-war struggle to re-establish its authority in Indo-China was a politicaland military catastrophe. Ho Chi Minh received double credit among the French domestic Left, as a fighter for national independence and as a Communist revolutionary—two identities as inextricably intertwined in his own thinking as they were in his burnished international image.
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Sending young men to fight and die in a ‘dirty war’ in Indo-China made little sense to most French voters; and letting Hanoi take over was not obviously more ill-advised than supporting the palpably inadequate Bao Dai, whom the French established as the country’s new ‘emperor’ in March 1949.

The French officer corps, on the other hand, was certainly keen to pursue the struggle in Vietnam; there, as later in Algeria, France’s martial heritage (or what remained of it) seemed at stake and the French High Command had a point to prove. But the French economy could never have sustained a long drawn out war in a far-flung colony without significant external aid. France’s war in Indo-China was funded by the Americans. At first, Washington’s contribution was indirect: thanks to US loans and aid, the French were able to divert considerable resources to an increasingly expensive and unsuccessful struggle to defeat the Vietminh. In effect, the USA underwrote post-war French economic modernization while France dedicated its own scarce resources to the war.

From 1950, American aid took a more direct form. Starting in July of that year (one month after the outbreak of war in nearby Korea) the US sharply increased its military assistance to French forces in South-East Asia. The French bargained hard before consenting to support the doomed European defense project and conceding West German membership in NATO: what they got in return (for allowing the US to protect them, as it seemed to aggrieved Washington insiders) was very substantial American military aid. Of all the European states France, by 1953, was by far the most dependent on US support, in cash and kind alike.

Only in 1954 did Washington call a halt, rejecting increasingly desperate French pleas for airborne help to save the doomed French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. After nearly eight years of fruitless and bloody struggle, it was clear to Washington not merely that the French could not re-establish their former authority in Indo-China, but that they were no match for Ho Chi Minh’s regular and guerilla forces. In America’s view the French had frittered their money away and were an increasingly risky investment. When Dien Bien Phu surrendered on May 7th 1954 and the French requested a cease-fire, no-one was surprised.

The fall of French Indo-China precipitated the collapse of the last of the French coalition governments that had tried to hold it, and the succession to the premiership of Pierre Mendès-France. Led by ‘PMF’ the French negotiated an agreement, signed at Geneva on July 21st 1954, under whose terms France withdrew from the region, leaving two separate entities—‘North’ and ‘South’ Vietnam—whose political relationship and institutions were to be determined by future elections. Those elections were never held, and the burden of sustaining the southern half of France’s former colony now fell to the Americans alone.

Few in France were sorry to see Indo-China go. Unlike the Dutch, the French had not been in the region very long; and even though America paid for the first Vietnam War (something of which very few Frenchmen were aware at the time), it was French soldiers who fought and died there. French politicians of the Right in particular castigated Mendès-France and his predecessors for their failure to prosecute the war more effectively, but no-one had anything better to propose and almost all were secretly pleased to put Vietnam behind them. Only the French Army—or more precisely the professional officer corps—harbored continuing grievances. Some younger officers, notably those who had first served in the Resistance or with the Free French and acquired there the habit of independent political judgment, began to nourish inchoate but dangerous resentments. Once again, they murmured, French troops in the field had been ill served by their political masters in Paris.

With the loss of Indo-China, French attention turned to North Africa. In one respect this was almost literally true—the Algerian insurrection began on November 1st 1954, just fourteen weeks after the signing of the Geneva accords. But North Africa had been at the center of Parisian concerns long since. Ever since the French first arrived in present-day Algeria in 1830, the colony there had been part of a larger French ambition, dating back further still, to dominate Saharan Africa from the Atlantic to Suez. Thwarted in the east by the British, the French had settled instead for primacy in the western Mediterranean and across the Sahara into west-central Africa.

Outside of the far older settlement in Quebec, and some islands of the Caribbean, Northern Africa (Algeria in particular) was the only French colony in which Europeans had established themselves permanently in large numbers. But many of the Europeans were not French in origin but rather Spanish, Italian, Greek or something else. Even an emblematically French Algerian like Albert Camus was part-Spanish, part-French; and his French forebears were very recent arrivals. It was a long time since France had had an excess of people; and unlike Russia, Poland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, Scotland (and even England), France had not been a land of emigrants for many generations. The French were not natural colonizers.

Nevertheless, if there was a France-outside-France it was in Algeria—confirmed, as we have seen, by Algeria’s technical presence
inside
France as part of the metropolitan administrative structure. The closest analogy elsewhere was Ulster, another overseas enclave in a former colony, institutionally incorporated into the ‘mainland’ and with a long-established settler community for whom the attachment to the imperial heartland mattered far more than it did to the metropolitan majority. The idea that Algeria might one day become independent (and thus Arab-ruled, given the overwhelming numerical predominance of Arabs and Berbers in its population) was unthinkable to its European minority.

Accordingly, French politicians had long avoided thinking about it. No French government except Léon Blum’s short-lived Popular Front of 1936 paid serious attention to the grievous mis-rule practiced by colonial administrators in French North Africa. Moderate Algerian nationalists like Ferhat Abbas were well known to French politicians and intellectuals before and after World War Two, but no-one really expected Paris to concede their modest goals of self-government or ‘home rule’ any time soon. Nevertheless, the Arab leadership was initially optimistic that the defeat of Hitler would usher in long-awaited reforms, and when they issued a manifesto on February 10th 1943, in the wake of the Allied landings in North Africa, they took great care to emphasize their loyalty to the ideals of 1789 and their affection for the ‘culture of France and the West that they had received and cherished’.

Their appeals went unheard. The government of liberated France showed little concern for Arab sentiment, and when this indifference resulted in an uprising in the Kabylia region east of Algiers in May 1945, the insurgents were uncompromisingly crushed. For the following decade Parisian attention was turned elsewhere. By the time these years of pent-up anger and thwarted expectations culminated in the outbreak of organized insurrection, on November 1st 1954, compromise was no longer on the agenda. The Algerian FLN—
Front de Libération Nationale
—was led by a younger generation of Arab nationalists who scorned the moderate, Francophile strategies of their elders. Their objective was not ‘home rule’ or reform but independence, a goal that successive French governments could not contemplate. The result was eight murderous years of civil war.

Belatedly, the French authorities proposed reforms. The new Socialist government of Guy Mollet granted independence in March 1956 to the neighboring French colonies of Tunisia and Morocco—the first surrender of colonial power on the African continent. But when Mollet visited Algiers, a crowd of European settlers pelted him with rotten fruit. Paris was caught between the implacable demands of the clandestine FLN and the refusal of Algeria’s European residents, now led by a Committee for the Defense of French Algeria (
l’Algérie française
), to accept any compromise with their Arab neighbors. The French strategy, if it merits the name, was now to defeat the FLN by force before putting pressure on the settlers to accept political reforms and some power-sharing measures.

The French army duly undertook a bitter war of attrition against the guerrillas of the FLN. Both sides regularly resorted to intimidation, torture, murder and outright terrorism. After a particularly gruesome series of Arab assassinations and European reprisals in December 1956, Mollet’s political representative Robert Lacoste gave French paratroop colonel Jacques Massu a free hand to destroy the nationalist insurgents in Algiers by whatever means necessary. By September 1957 Massu was victorious, having broken a general strike and crushed the insurgents in the Battle of Algiers. The Arab population paid a terrible price, but the reputation of France was irrevocably sullied. And the European settlers remained as suspicious as ever of Paris’s long-term intentions.
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In February 1958 the newly installed government of Felix Gaillard was embarrassed by the French air force’s bombing of Sakhiet, a town across the border in Tunisia suspected of serving as a base for Algerian nationalists. The resulting international outcry, and offers of Anglo-American ‘good offices’ to help solve the Algerian imbroglio, led to growing fears among the Europeans of Algeria that Paris was planning to abandon them. Policemen and soldiers in Paris and Algiers began openly to demonstrate their sympathy for the settlers’ cause. The Gaillard government, France’s third in eleven months, resigned on April 15th. Ten days later there was a huge demonstration in Algiers demanding the preservation in perpetuity of French Algeria and the return to power of De Gaulle; the organizers of the gathering formed themselves into a Committee of Public Safety, provocatively echoing the French Revolutionary institution of the same name.

On May 15th, forty-eight hours after yet another French government, led by Pierre Pfimlin, had been inaugurated in Paris, General Raoul Salan—the French military commander in Algeria—shouted out De Gaulle’s name to a cheering crowd in the Forum in Algiers. De Gaulle himself, who had been conspicuously silent since retreating from public life to his home village of Colombey in eastern France, reappeared in public to address a press conference on May 19th. Armed rebels seized control of the island of Corsica and Paris was gripped by rumours of imminent paratroop landings. On May 28th Pfimlin resigned and President René Coty called upon De Gaulle to form a government. Without even pretending to demur, De Gaulle took office on June 1st and was voted full powers by the National Assembly the following day. His first act was to fly to Algiers, where on June 4th he announced delphically to an enthusiastic crowd of cheering soldiers and grateful Europeans:
‘Je vous ai compris’
(‘I have understood you’).

The new French Prime Minister had indeed understood his Algerian supporters, better than they knew. He was immensely popular among the Europeans of Algeria, who saw him as their saviour: in the referendum of September 1958 De Gaulle secured 80 percent of the vote in France, but 96 percent of the vote in Algeria.
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But among De Gaulle’s many distinctive traits was an unwavering appreciation for order and legitimacy. The hero of the Free French, the implacable critic of Vichy, the man who had restored the credibility of the French state after August 1944 was no friend of the Algerian rebels (many of them former Pétainists), much less the free-thinking insurrectionary young officers who had taken their part. His first task, as he understood it, was to restore the authority of government in France. His second and related objective was to resolve the Algerian conflict that had so dramatically undermined it.

Within a year it was clear that Paris and Algiers were on a collision course. International opinion was increasingly favorable to the FLN and its demand for independence. The British were granting independence to their African colonies. Even the Belgians finally released the Congo in June 1960 (albeit in an irresponsible manner and with disastrous results).
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Colonial Algeria was fast becoming an anachronism, as De Gaulle fully understood. He had already established a ‘Communauté Française’ as the first step towards a ‘commonwealth’ of France’s former colonies. South of the Sahara, formal independence would be granted rapidly to French-educated elites of countries that were far too weak to stand alone and would thus be utterly dependent on France for decades to come. In September 1959, just one year after coming to power, the French President proposed ‘self-determination’ for Algeria.

Infuriated by what they regarded as evidence of a coming sell-out, officers and settlers in Algeria began planning a full-scale revolt. There were plots, coups and talk of revolution. In January 1960 barricades went up in Algiers and ‘ultra-patriots’ shot at French gendarmes. But the revolt collapsed in the face of De Gaulle’s intransigence and unreliable senior officers (including Massu and his superior, General Maurice Challe) were carefully re-assigned away from Algeria. The disturbances continued, however, culminating in an unsuccessful military
putsch
in April 1961, inspired by the newly formed
OAS
(Organisation de l’Armée Secrète). But the conspirators failed to shift De Gaulle, who went on French national radio to denounce the ‘military
pronunciamento
by a handful of retired generals’. The chief victim of the coup was the morale and the international image (what remained of it) of the French Army. An overwhelming majority of Frenchmen and women, many of them with sons serving in Algeria, drew the conclusion that Algerian independence was not just inevitable but desirable—and for the sake of France, the sooner the better.
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