Algeria and France

From Colonialism to Cooperation

Dorothy Pickles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138954502
• eBook ISBN: 9781317356509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Beginning as a small, seemingly insignificant rebellion in 1954, the Algerian struggle for independence assumed such proportions that it strangled France's foreign policy, threatened her international relations, poisoned the political atmosphere, and toppled one government after another. In this book, first published in 1963, a specialist on French affairs assesses the impact on France of the Algerian problem, the various attempts to solve that problem, and the implications of the solution finally found. It is a study of conflict, a careful consideration of the interaction between internal politics and a peculiarly difficult external problem – and, most of all, an objective and lucid presentation of the essential elements of a tragic episode in French history.

1. The Uniqueness of the Algerian Problem

The Scope of the Inquiry

This is not a book about Algeria. It is a brief study of only one aspect of the Algerian problem, namely, its impact on the politics of postwar France. It does not, therefore, discuss directly the course of the rebellion, on which a good deal has already been written in English as well as in French. Nor does it discuss the aims and aspirations of Algerian nationalism, its racial and political background, and its relations to Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism. This is a study, not of what France did to Algeria, but of what Algeria did to France. It is an attempt to understand how and why, from a small rebellion in 1954, which almost all French politicians expected to be speedily put down, the Algerian problem became France’s Old Man of the Sea—strangling her foreign policy, threatening her relations with her NATO allies, with the newly independent states south of the Sahara and with Morocco and Tunisia, poisoning the political atmosphere, and bringing about the fall of one government after another and finally of the regime itself.

It is also an attempt, first, to follow the processes by which General de Gaulle set out in 1958 to unblock, one after the other, the roads that Algeria had blocked, and then to assess the extent to which he succeeded or failed in his objectives. And finally, it seeks to discuss briefly some of the problems that this seven-year war has left behind and that Algerian independence will create for France.

The excuse for such an inquiry into the politics of France’s Algerian problem is that Franco-Algerian relations have constituted a unique experiment and a unique problem, whose consequences will not disappear with Algerian independence. This was not just another colonial problem. There has been far more incomprehension and misunderstanding of the issues involved in the Algerian problem than there has been in the case of any other problem of twentieth-century “decolonization.” American anticolonialism, British smugness regarding the British record in the field of decolonization, the nationalist solidarity of new nations, and sheer ignorance of Algeria’s economic problems and her political heritage have combined to produce a great many oversimplified attitudes, some of which have naturally been deliberately encouraged by Communist propaganda. These have certainly contributed to a worsening of France’s foreign relations and may well have helped to increase her political rigidities in relation to the Algerian problem itself.

To look at the Algerian problem from the French angle, however, does not mean seeing it through French eyes and producing the kind of apologia to which delegates at the United Nations General Assembly were regularly treated by the French representative whenever the problem of Algeria was on the agenda. It was precisely because France had become imprisoned in the vicious circle created by her involvement in the Algerian imbroglio, and by its impact on her domestic and foreign policies, that she failed for so long to see what was so plain to outsiders—namely, that there could be, in the end, only one way of breaking out of the vicious circle.

Now that that course has been taken and Algerian independence is a juridical fact, the world, as well as France, must learn to live with it. Is is very probable that events in Algeria during the next few years will enable many Frenchmen to say bitterly, “We told you so,” as some have already done in recent months. For the fact that independence was inevitable does not mean that it is, in practice, possible. It may be useful, however, for several reasons, to choose this moment to look briefly at this unique relationship, which, after 132 years of French rule, now enters a new phase. For neither side is likely to lose for a long time the psychological and political attitudes that the past relationship has created. The French have long political memories. The impact of French civilization on all territories within the French sphere of influence has been deep and lasting, and, whatever may be the strength of anticolonialism, the heritage of “French Algeria” will inevitably color the attitudes of “Algerian Algeria” for a long time to come.

Colonialism and Coexistence

To the Moslem nationalists, Algeria had, by 1954, become simply a problem of colonialism. Yet it was precisely the fact that Algeria was both more and less than a colony that helped to make the Algerian problem unique. France is open to criticism on the score of her policies toward overseas territories (and what former colonial power is not?), but at least she has given proof in recent years of her ability to shed with remarkable speed the attitudes of outdated colonialism. In Indochina, France was defeated for a number of reasons, among which should be included the appalling difficulties encountered by French governments in the years immediately following the war, and her policies there certainly became in the end indefensible. She was slow to recognize the inevitability of Moroccan and Tunisian independence, partly for the same reasons. But independence came, and with it the establishment of friendly relations with France and, even in the face of difficulties and misunderstandings, an obvious will to create and maintain both friendship and cooperation. The eleven states of West and Equatorial Africa, together with Madagascar, which agreed in 1958 to form a Community with France, moved from a near-colonial status to that of complete independence within two years, and all achieved juridical sovereignty within a year of their formal request for independence. All have been, and are still, to a greater or lesser degree, anxious to cooperate with France and are counting on and receiving technical and financial aid on a scale that puts France in the forefront of the great powers providing aid to Africa.

Only in the case of Algeria was there no evolution of this kind. It was not until September, 1959, that an offer of independence was made to Algeria, and it was then hedged about with conditions that were impossible to fulfill while the war continued. It took three and a half years to achieve a cease-fire. And even then, the first result of the cessation of Franco-Moslem hostilities was civil war between Frenchmen in Algeria, followed by bitter quarrels between Algerian nationalists.

What more than anything else helped first to create the Algerian problem and then to render it insoluble was the need to provide for the coexistence of two communities which differed in their religion, civilization, racial origin, and political outlook. Algeria is unique because, though it was not a colony, this situation created colonialist attitudes, and because the problem of coexistence was in itself one of the most difficult that the world has so far had to face. The rebellion of 1954 became a war because a numerically dominant but economically and politically backward Moslem population, in a large, strategically situated territory, geographically very close to France, sought independence from her, while a minority mainly of European origin, politically, economically, and administratively dominant, wanted passionately to remain French. But this was not merely a “settler” problem. The European population, which constituted one-sixth of the urban population and almost half the population in the two largest and most important towns, had no less valid claims than the 9 million Moslems to consider Algeria as their mother country. Indeed, they could legitimately claim that they had made the country out of nothing, that they were essential to the running of its industry, agriculture, and education. They could also legitimately claim part of the credit for the fact that, thanks to French health services, there were 9 million Moslems (10 million by 1962), whereas in 1936 there had been only 6 million. For these health services, set up and largely (though not entirely) run by Europeans, now keep alive Moslems who, before the French developed the country, would have died either of starvation or of disease. European Algerians had been French citizens for three or four generations, and had no desire to be integrated in a backward Moslem nation, whose traditional divisions and fanatic nationalism, on all the evidence available from the recent experience of the French population in the neighboring, more politically advanced, and less divided Arab states, would make their lives physically uncomfortable and economically and politically untenable. They are well aware that, in Morocco and Tunisia, in spite of agreements, good intentions, and the desperate need for French administrators, and in spite of the fact that French residents there were a smaller proportion of the population and psychologically more adaptable than the European Algerians, there has been since independence a steady trickle, sometimes amounting to a flow, of French residents back to France.

The Impact of the War

The Algerian problem is unique also in that the relations between these two communities became exacerbated and distorted by more than seven years of nationalist rebellion, in which first Moslems and then Europeans resorted to terrorism, in which some Moslems were guilty of barbaric atrocities and some French soldiers of torture. In different ways, both sides progressively lost sight of reality. To British and American minds, the European Algerian myth of a permanently French Algeria was patently unrealistic in the postwar climate of Arab and African nationalism. As the program of a privileged minority which had consistently blocked every minor or major move since the war in the direction of greater equality between the two communities, the movement for Algérie française seemed more sinister than deluded. On the other hand, even to many informed and sympathetic French supporters of Algeria’s right to independence, the possibility of real independence seemed, and still seems, no less unrealistic. The 1950’s produced both scholarly reports and imaginative pictures of the essential Algerian predicament. These agreed that the cost of achieving in the reasonably immediate future even a small and inadequate rise in the appallingly low standard of living in Algeria would be astronomical. They agreed, too, on the insurmountable difficulties of finding the capital and the personnel even to make a start on the job of turning Algeria into an economically viable territory.

Most of the nationalist movement’s leaders, some of whom were educated in France, were well aware that, without French help, Algerian independence could not be translated effectively from paper to practice. But years of disappointment and of fading faith in French promises had created a deep-rooted suspicion of France’s intentions that made these leaders as unrealistic, in their own way, as the supporters of Algérie française. As the prospects of Franco-Algerian agreement on a cease-fire came nearer, the adoption by European insurrectionary organizations in Algeria of the indiscriminate terrorist methods first used by Moslems—methods that highly trained French deserters from parachutist or Foreign Legion regiments were able to use far more effectively and ruthlessly than the Moslems had done—led to a rising race hatred, which threatened to introduce into an already almost insoluble problem new and disastrous complications. During the weeks following the signature of the Evian agreements, it looked at times as if the despairing violence of the European Algerian population might not merely lead to their own destruction, but might produce both civil and racial war on a scale that would make any attempt to implement the agreement impossible.

Algeria, then, alone of former French possessions in Africa, will have won independence as a result of war—a war consisting of seven and a half years of increasingly bitter and barbaric fighting. Morocco and Tunisia became independent by virtue of agreements with France arrived at before nationalist resentment and refusal to cooperate with the French had led either to total breakdown of the administrative machine or to open war. The African states and Madagascar achieved independence in harmony and understanding with France. Only Algeria, whose entire administrative framework was French, and most of whose administrators were European, had to fight for independence at the cost of thousands of lives on both sides.

The Frenchness of Algeria

Yet, though Algeria has been far more than the other former French possessions an enemy of France, her links with France have been and must remain far closer than theirs. At best, Algeria will be for decades a poor relation of France. It was the realization of this fact that, as much as anything else, helped to prevent French governments and parties from evolving any coherent and consistent Algerian policy—or at least any positive policy—until it was too late. Up to 1956, the only point on which virtually the whole of France was united was that Algerian independence was unthinkable and unmentionable.

On the face of it, such an attitude appears to Anglo-Saxons to reveal a backward-looking approach, out of touch with twentieth-century ealities. In its context, it is more comprehensible. And its context was one that the majority of the Algerian political elite and of educated Algerian opinion shared until a few years ago. On both sides of the Mediterranean, minds have been conditioned by French attitudes and French ways. The Moslem Algerians now feel themselves to be Algerian. But this sense of nationhood is quite new, except among small, rival, and relatively uninfluential minorities. Among the educated Algerian elite, there was a deep-rooted belief that there was no Algerian nation, but only a French nation, to which Algerians should be, and indeed were, proud to belong, and within which they could, in increasing numbers, become first-class French citizens. This attitude survived even up to and beyond the first months of the rebellion. The present nationalist leaders grew up in this atmosphere, thinking of themselves either bitterly as second-class Frenchmen, or hopefully as on the way to becoming first-class Frenchmen. Algerians belonged to French political parties, sat in the French Parliament. Some of their leaders speak French better than they do Arabic. Some have married Frenchwomen and educated their children in France. The administrative framework of Algeria is French. Algerian education is French in spirit and methods.¹

Nor is this impact of French language and culture limited to the small class of intelligentsia. Of the adult male working population, one-third has been used to living and working for periods in France, alongside French workers. A large number continued to do so through the war years, for the conflict was a civil, not a foreign, war and did not affect the right of free movement between Algeria and France. At the end of 1961, there were still some 125,000 Algerian workers living in the Paris region alone, and the suburbs of a number of other industrial centers also had large Algerian populations.

Algeria, then, was far more than a colony. Anglo-Saxons tend to underestimate the positive side of assimilation and, in particular, the tremendous influence of what might be termed French cultural colonialism. The representatives of the former French overseas territories are themselves under no illusion about this. M. Ferhat Abbas, the first Prime Minister of the Algerian provisional government, has been quoted often enough on the theme of the French-ness of Algeria to make it unnecessary to quote his remarks here.² They could be supplemented by other less well-known tributes to the depth and extent of French influence on the politically minded in all territories administered, or formerly administered, by France.

“We are Frenchmen,” said M. Fily-Dabo Sissoko in the National Assembly in 1946, “and we shall remain so until the end of time, because France is the nation that has opened our eyes and enabled us to speak from this rostrum to Frenchmen like ourselves.”³

“We are not attached to France for currency reasons,” sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 The Uniqueness of the Algerian Problem
• 2 French Algeria—From Reality to Myth
• 3 Deaf Men’s Dialogue
• 4 General de Gaulle and Algeria—From French Algeria to Algerian Algeria
• 5 General de Gaulle and Algeria—Toward Independence
• 6 General de Gaulle and Algeria—Success or Failurev?
• 7 Aftermath in Algeria—Can Franco-Algerian Cooperation Work?
• 8 Aftermath in France—Can the Fifth Republic Survive?
• List of Abbreviations
• A Short Bibliography
• Index