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Philip Dine
National University of Ireland, Galway
When the French retreat from overseas empire was finally completed in
1962 – give or take the occasional little local difficulty in
otherwise assimilated territories such as New Caledonia – a veil was
effectively drawn over France’s colonial past. Henceforth, the
emphasis would be on the country’s transformation from a
predominantly rural, traditional, and inward-looking nation into a modern
and technologically innovative power, at the forefront of the project of
Europeanization and thus leading the old continent into a new economic and
political age. In this way, as Kristin Ross has argued most persuasively,
the narratives of modernization and decolonization were artificially
separated.[1] After 1962, it was as if the two savage colonial wars that
France had fought since 1945, in a vain attempt to re-establish itself as
a great power on the basis of imperial assumptions that had been swept
away by the wartime rise of the two superpowers, had never actually
occurred. In the case of the first of these conflicts, the 1946-1954 war
in Indo-China, France fought and lost a guerrilla campaign against the
forces of the nationalist Viet-Minh before being catastrophically defeated
in the war’s only set-piece battle, at Dien-Bien-Phu. Conducted far
from French shores, in a colony with few French settlers, and by an army
composed essentially of members of the Foreign Legion and locally
recruited troops, it was a nasty little war that was all too easily
ignored at the time and was then comprehensively forgotten by the France
of les Trente glorieuses [the thirty glorious years of the French
post-war economic miracle]. Indeed, it is still largely forgotten in
France, and if it is remembered at all, it is merely as the precursor to
the United States’ extensively mediatized and commemorated
misadventures in Vietnam.
However, the Algerian war was very different, and much less easy for the
frenetically modernizing France of the later 1950s and early 1960s to
ignore. Indeed, it was Algeria, rather than Indo-China, that was to become
France’s ‘Vietnam’. To understand the significance of ‘French’
Algeria when the war there was first launched by the revolutionary Front
de Libération Nationale (FLN) on 1 November 1954, it is necessary
to remember that this huge territory was by far the most important of the
variously described colonies that France still controlled at this time in
North and sub-Saharan Africa. This pre-eminence was at once strategic,
economic, political, and, perhaps above all, psychological. Indeed,
Algeria had long been a ‘special case’ within France’s
overseas territories. Its geographical proximity helped to explain the
fact that Algeria was the only French territory with a significant settler
population: some one million ‘Europeans’ out of a total ten
million inhabitants; the others being described as ‘Arabs’ (and,
sometimes, ‘Kabyles’) or ‘Muslims’, rather than
Algerians. The territory was also much closer to France than its other
colonies, just across the Mediterranean; and it was this proximity that
had been exploited by General Charles de Gaulle during World War II, when
the Anglo-American landings in North Africa in November 1942 allowed him
to establish a French government in exile in Algiers. This was in turn
part of a broader pattern of looking to North Africa as a compensation for
European military defeats that could be traced back to 1815, through 1870,
to 1940; and indeed, this phenomenon would come into play again in 1954,
as the career officers defeated in Indo-China sought to avenge that
military defeat in another colonial theatre.
The particular moral and material investment made by the French army in
Algeria, both before de Gaulle and after him, was also made possible by
the territory’s unique legal status. For, following the
administrative incorporation of the vast territory of Algeria into the
body of the French Republic in the wake of the revolutionary events of
1848, Algeria was deemed not to be a colony at all, but rather an integral
part of France. Thus reinvented as three French départements,
Algeria was henceforth officially considered to be as French as, for
instance, Alsace, Brittany, or Corsica – all provinces with their own
‘personalities’, but nonetheless very much part of the Republic.
This, then, was the basis of the official myth of ‘French’
Algeria, or Algérie française; and it was this that
would allow successive French Ministers of the Interior – who,
symptomatically, had responsibility for the territory, rather than their
colleagues in the Foreign or Colonial Ministries – to send some 2.5
million young Frenchmen to fight in Algeria in a war that could never
officially exist. The young François Mitterrand was thus the first
to authorize the use of conscription in an attempt to deal with the ‘troubles’,
‘security problems’, and ‘disorder’ associated with
the événements [events] in Algeria; while future
President of the Republic Jacques Chirac would be just one member of a
whole generation of young Frenchmen sent to fight in ‘the war without
a name’.[2]
While successive French governments sought systematically to refute any
suggestion that the conflict in Algeria actually was a war, there could be
little denying the impact of the hostilities on domestic political life.
It was the failure of the weak coalition governments of the Fourth
Republic (which had been established following the Liberation of France
from Nazi occupation in 1944) to find a solution to the Algerian crisis
that led directly to the collapse of the regime and the return to power of
France’s wartime ‘saviour’, the ageing General Charles de
Gaulle, in May-June 1958. In what was effectively a bloodless military
coup, de Gaulle was restored to power by the army and its supporters among
the settlers of Algeria specifically in order to maintain French control
over the territory. However, through a combination of shrewd political
manoeuvring and occasional displays of force, de Gaulle managed to bring
the overwhelming majority of the French people to accept the inevitability
of Algerian independence by early 1962. This dramatic turn-around in
French public opinion, including particularly a majority within the army,
was predicated upon the replacement of what had been the post-war
consensus in favour of the preservation of France’s overseas
possessions, where necessary with military force, with a new acceptance of
a post-imperial world. Indeed, as indicated above, so complete was this
transformation that after 1962 France’s colonial past became a taboo
subject, with important implications not only for those individuals who
fought in the conflict, or were otherwise caught up in it, but also for
French society as a whole. These individual and communal impacts will be
explored briefly by way of a conclusion. However, the central focus of the
remainder of this paper is on the role played by intellectual mobilization
in the reordering of French public opinion in this period, and
particularly by the polemical writing produced in response to the Algerian
war.
The Algerian war has been persuasively analysed by David Schalk as the
last great battleground of France’s intellectual class, and as such
the high spot of post-war intellectual engagement in that country. As he
puts it in his War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam,
rarely has the French intellectual class been so united as in its
denunciation of what was widely perceived to be the ‘cancer’ of
the Algerian war: ‘Once that cancer had been excised from the French
body politic, and the battle of the word won, the solder melted, the
energies of the French intellectual class dispersed, and there was a
nearly instantaneous, widely noted, and sometimes lamented dégagement’.[3]
In this reading of the range of intellectual responses to the conflict,
Schalk follows influential French commentators such as Michel Crouzet,
Bernard Droz, and Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, who have all sought to explain the
peculiar combination of circumstances that made for virtual unanimity
among intellectuals in opposition to the military campaign in Algeria. So,
while a minority of conservative intellectuals did put their weight behind
Algérie française, the great majority engaged in
what Michel Crouzet famously termed une bataille de l’écrit
[a battle of the written word] against the undeclared war that France was
waging on the Algerian people.[4]
This ‘dirty war’ [la sale guerre] involved
particularly the systematic use of torture and summary execution, the
large-scale displacement of civilian populations, and the replacement of
the rule of law by an often-arbitrary military administration. To permit
this campaign to be waged, rigorous censorship was imposed both within
Algeria and back in ‘metropolitan’ France. Newspapers and
periodicals including Le Monde, then as now the national journal
of record, L’Express, and the liberal Catholic periodicals
Témoignage chrétien and Esprit were all
affected by seizures and prohibitions, as were many publications further
to the Left. Banned books included particularly Henri Alleg’s La
Question (1958), an account by the Communist editor of the radical
Alger républicain newspaper of his arrest and torture by
French paratroopers during the crucial anti-terrorist campaign known as
the ‘Battle of Algiers’ in 1957. Films to be refused
certification included Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat
(1960), which also dared, if only obliquely, to break the officially
imposed silence on torture and similarly abhorrent ‘pacification’
methods in Algeria. Against this background, French intellectuals
nevertheless managed to make their voices heard through the very many
books, articles, pamphlets, petitions, manifestos, and other
demonstrations of intellectual engagement generated in response to the
continuing hostilities in Algeria. These included particularly the oral
defence at the Sorbonne, and in absentia, of a doctoral thesis by
Algiers University mathematics lecturer Maurice Audin, like Alleg a ‘European’
member of the Algerian Communist Party, who had been arrested by
paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers, and was never to be seen again.
Also of importance were the defence statements made at the trial of the
so-called porteurs de valise, those members of a network of
radical intellectuals organized by Jean-Paul Sartre’s close friend
and collaborator, Francis Jeanson, who became involved in non-violent
direct action to support the FLN’s war effort inside France itself.
As the above comments will have suggested, and as John Talbott has
pointed out, the Algerian conflict is remarkable in the post-war history
of France in that it ‘involved issues over which the French could
easily contemplate killing each other’.[5] Against this backdrop, it
is easier to make sense both of some unpredictable intellectual alliances,
but also of some particularly hostile exchanges between leading figures.
So, for instance, the seizure of Henri Alleg’s La Question in
March 1958 resulted in an unprecedented ‘Solemn Address to the
President of the Republic’ by four of the countries most celebrated,
but also most politically diverse, writers: the Nobel laureates François
Mauriac and Roger Martin du Gard; de Gaulle’s future Minister of
Culture André Malraux; and the intellectual who, perhaps, more than
any other has become durably associated with intellectual opposition to
the Algerian war, Jean-Paul Sartre.[6] That the Marxist existentialism of
Sartre should have been temporarily reconciled with the devout Catholicism
of Mauriac is, itself, remarkable enough. However, the composition of this
improbable tactical alliance is at least as noteworthy for the one
intellectual who refused to sign the ‘Solemn Address’ as it is
for those who actually agreed to be involved. For the ghost at this
particular intellectual feast was none other than ‘French’
Algeria’s brightest intellectual star, Albert Camus, who had himself
received the Nobel Prize for literature only a few months earlier.
Whatever the range of ‘Dreyfusards, Bolsheviks, and Tiersmondistes’
who, in Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s celebrated taxonomy, managed to
overlook their ideological differences in order to join forces against the
conduct and/or the continuation of the war in Algeria[7] – the two
were by no means the same thing, and considerable intellectual heat was
generated in consequence – it was above all Camus’s repeated
failure to speak out that resulted in the most sustained polemical
attacks.
The polemic generated by Albert Camus’s refusal to condemn the
French war in Algeria may be the most striking illustration of such
writing in this particular context, but it is by no means the only one.
However, all other examples of what we might conveniently describe as
significantly personalized critiques of the political stances taken by
leading French intellectuals on the Algerian question need to be set
against the backdrop of this particularly fraught case. For Camus was at
one and the same time France’s pre-eminent liberal humanist, and a
pied-noir, that is to say a member of the settler community that
was most directly threatened by the FLN’s goal of national
independence, and by the often savage means to which the nationalist
fighters typically resorted in attempting to secure that political end.
Moreover, Camus had established himself even before World War II as one of
the first ‘European’ observers to criticize the colonial regime
in Algeria. His series of reports on ‘La Misère de la Kabylie’
[The Poverty of the Kabylia Region], published in the radical Alger républicain
newspaper as early as 1939, revealed his commitment to the cause of ‘justice’,
by which he understood social and economic (although not necessarily
political or cultural) equality for the ‘Muslim’ majority
population of Algeria. Indeed, for the young Camus, the only convincing
argument that could be found for a continued French presence in Algeria
was precisely the extent to which France was able to improve the
indigenous population’s moral and material conditions of existence.
However, as James Le Sueur has pointed out, Camus was not able in 1939,
and still less during the Algerian war, to take this argument to its
logical end:
Camus remained faithful to the argument that the original sin of the
colonial conquest could be atoned for by delivering the ‘conquered’
to their ‘profound grandeur,’ but he stopped short of bringing
the proposition to its proper conclusion. If the French continually
refused to bring out Algerians’ grandeur, could Algerians’
reject French rights of occupation? This issue would go to the heart of
the debate over the question of Camus...[8]
Indeed, it was Camus’s repeated failure to engage with this most
essential of questions that would lead him first to attempt vainly to
limit the nature of the Algerian war, then publicly to deny his most
fundamental principle of ‘justice’, and finally to retreat into
silence in the face of concerted attacks from across the French
intellectual spectrum.
Camus’s first major intervention in the Algerian debate was doomed
from the outset, but was no less courageous for all that. In January 1956,
Camus travelled back to Algiers, at considerable personal risk, to call
for what he called une trêve civile [a civilian truce] in
the conflict. This appeal for the FLN and the French army alike to pledge
themselves to avoid targeting civilians predictably fell on deaf ears on
both sides, but prompted outrage on the part of Camus’s own pied-noir
[French Algerian] community. As Schalk notes, ‘although he did not
know it at the time, Camus was protected inside the hall where he made his
speech, which was located in the Muslim quarter, by clandestine FLN
militants.... Outside a crowd of angry pieds-noirs shouted “Camus
to the gallows!”’[9] While this attempt to set civilized limits
to what was becoming an ever more nasty war made Camus few friends among
the intellectual critics of the conflict, many liberals and leftists
continued to believe that his personal history of political commitment
would ultimately oblige him to speak out against both France’s
military means and its political ends in Algeria. However, following the
failure of his plea for a civilian truce, he carefully avoided further
public comment on events in Algeria throughout 1956 and most of 1957. Yet,
paradoxically, he did speak out on both the Soviet invasion of Hungary in
October 1956 and on the continued use of capital punishment in France
(including the three French ‘departments’ of Algeria) in
June-July 1957. In both cases, his political opponents seized upon Camus’s
remarks in order to attack his stance on Algeria:
For instance, [...] François Mauriac, Camus’s long-time
antagonist, used the publication of Camus’s ‘Reflections [on the
Guillotine]’ as an opportunity to ridicule the contradictions of
Camus’s position on Algeria. Mauriac began by admitting that he
shared many of Camus’s reservations about the guillotine, yet asked
himself, ‘But why do I feel sick when I read the book?’ An
intense critic of police brutality against Algerians, Mauriac noted that
capital punishment might be a useful weapon against the abusive and
corrupt colonial state. In fact, he claimed that, in police-sponsored
murders, capital punishment would bring back ‘dignity and honour’
‘Abolish the death penalty,’ Mauriac concluded, ‘when one
re-establishes torture? Let us see a little logic, Camus!’[10]
In the face of such attacks, and others relating to his refusal to
intervene publicly (but not, it should be noted, privately) against the
death sentence imposed on convicted FLN killer Mohamed Ben Sadok later in
1957, Camus retreated further into silence. This would only be broken on
two further occasions prior to his untimely death in a car crash in
January 1960.
The first of these interventions occurred well away from both France and
Algeria, but would have a lasting impact on the perception of Camus there
and beyond. Having learned in October 1957 that he was to be awarded the
Nobel Prize, Camus had travelled to Stockholm on 10 December for the
conferment ceremony. As Le Sueur points out: ‘Four days after his
Nobel address and while still in Sweden, Camus delivered a speech to
students at the University of Uppsala that would forever change his life
and, for critics, the question of Camus’.[11] In response to the
sustained heckling that he received from an Algerian student in the
audience, Camus lost his temper and, departing from his prepared text,
rashly sought to explain his recent silence on the Algerian war in terms
that were subsequently to haunt him:
C’est avec une certaine répugnance que je donne ainsi mes
raisons au public. J’ai toujours condamné la terreur. Je dois
condamner aussi un terrorisme qui s’exerce aveuglément, dans
les rues d’Alger, par exemple, et qui un jour peut frapper ma mère,
ma famille. Je crois à la justice, mais je défendrai ma mère
avant la justice.[12]
Acutely aware of the failings of the French colonial project in Algeria,
yet unable to accept the replacement of French ‘civilization’ in
the territory by what he perceived as the barbarity of an FLN-led
independence, Camus was now firmly impaled on the horns of his personal
Algerian dilemma. This uncomfortable position was, perhaps, almost
inevitable given the great writer’s apparently inescapable situation
as the archetypal liberal humanist colonisateur de bonne volonté
or ‘colonizer of good will’, famously identified in 1957 by
Albert Memmi.[13] Apart from writing a self-justifying introduction to
accompany his collected earlier writings on the Algerian question,
published in 1958 as Actuelles III: Chroniques algériennes,
Camus would refuse to make any further public comment on Algeria.
In contrast, many intellectuals of various political hues would be only
too willing to attack Camus after what was widely perceived to be a
confession of faith in Algérie française, as well as
in his mother and the pied-noir community from which they had both
sprung. While Sartre himself refrained from further engagement further in
what was already ‘the bitter quarrel between France’s two most
famous intellectuals [...] a feud that had simmered since 1945 and became
painfully public in 1951 when Camus’s L’Homme révolté
[The Rebel] appeared’[14], those close to him, such as Simone de
Beauvoir, had no such scruples. Others to make notable attacks on Camus at
this time included the poet Jean Sénac, one of the very few French
Algerians to opt for the FLN rather than the pieds-noirs, the
journalist Gilles Martinet, the Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun (who was
later to be assassinated by pied-noir terrorists), and the
imprisoned Algerian nationalist Ahmed Taleb Ibrahimi.[15] As Le Sueur has
convincingly argued, it was Taleb Ibrahimi’s open letter to Camus
from prison in August 1959 that may well have constituted the most
blistering condemnation of the great liberal humanist’s final blurted
statement of his reasons for keeping silent about Algeria:
You, the man who condemns terrorism for fear that your own [family] will
be victims of it, you who speak often in moving terms about your mother,
do you know that some of ours have lost their entire families because of
the searching [ratissages] of the French army, that others have
seen their mother (yes, Camus, their mother!) humiliated by French
soldiers, and in the most ignoble fashion?[16]
Indeed, even Camus’s closest friends would come to criticize his
avowed preference for his ‘mother’ over ‘justice’. So
it was that former air force colonel Jules Roy, one of the most
clear-sighted and self-critical members of the pied-noir
community, wrote in his influential critique of the French war in Algeria
– entitled precisely, and in spite of the continued government
denials of the war’s very existence, La Guerre d’Algérie
(1960) – that ‘Il ne s’agit pas de préférer
sa mère à la justice. Il s’agit d’aimer la justice
autant que sa propre mère’.[17] However, it is indicative of
the prevailing mood of the times that even such well-intentioned attempts
to expiate perceived intellectual sins of omission were themselves
particularly liable to cause a furore: ‘Roy’s appropriation of
Camus’s unfinished business had received mostly applause from France;
other attempts to write for Camus quickly provoked polemics’.[18]
If we accept that a key criterion for any assessment of polemical
writing should be its practical political (or other desired) impact, Jules
Roy’s La Guerre d’Algérie must be rated highly.
With Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s Lieutenant en Algérie
(1957) – a harrowing account by a leading journalist of his own
experiences as a conscript in Algeria – and Henri Alleg’s La
Question (1958), described above, Roy’s text is one of the very
few examples of the at least a thousand and one books inspired by the
Algerian war that can, with any degree of confidence, be said to have
exerted a direct influence on French public opinion regarding the conduct
and, crucially, the continuation of the conflict. As John Talbott notes,
the exceptional impact of this particular polemic was due not only to the
privileged status of the author – as both a former military man and a
member of the settler community – but also to its timing and, very
unusually, the effective endorsement of its particular message by the
hitherto highly censorious authorities:
La Guerre d’Algérie would have been a prime
candidate for seizure under the Fourth Republic – or in the early
days of the Fifth, for that matter. But in the same weeks that the police
were laying hold of France observateur, Les Temps modernes,
and Vérité-Liberté, Roy’s book became a
best seller. The government’s failure to remove it from circulation
may have been an oversight. The police may have left La Guerre d’Algérie
alone, though, because Roy wrote what de Gaulle thought. To announce that
France had nothing to gain from continuing the struggle in Algeria was to
state views de Gaulle had already offered. Perhaps a best seller
accustomed opinion to ideas unthinkable six years earlier. Perhaps its
success showed that these ideas were already popular.[19]
Roy’s contribution to the abundant polemical literature of the
Algerian conflict did not, however, end with this very influential
critique of France’s political and military misadventures in his
native land. The publication in 1971 of La Vraie bataille d’Alger
– General Jacques Massu’s attempt to exculpate himself and the
parachute corps that he had commanded in 1957, and which included
particularly an overt justification of torture – prompted Roy to
return to the arena. The veteran polemicist’s response to Massu’s
volume, entitled nothing less than J’accuse le général
Massu (1972) not only invoked the spirit of Captain Dreyfus, once
again, but also underlined the abiding applicability of Zola’s model
of the campaigning French intellectual in the Algerian context. However,
Roy was to reflect in a more composed and revealing manner on this riposte
to Massu’s ‘livre triomphaliste’ [triumphalistic book] two
decades later, in his own Mémoires barbares (1989):
On cherchait un mameluk pour lui rabaisser le caquet, à ce général,
j’écrivis un pamphlet comme une toccata, puis vaguement [...]
je m’attendis encore à tout, mais il ne se passa rien. Le
silence engloutit peu à peu les colères, les hargnes s’éteignent.
On ne sait plus qui à raison ou tort, car chacun de nous croit posséder
la vérité.[20]
However, Roy was to prove mistaken in believing that the anger and
aggression of the war years had disappeared from French discussions of the
Algerian conflict by the late 1980s.
On the one hand, it is true, the general reluctance to engage with the
Algerian war that typified the attitudes of French war veterans,
politicians, historians, and others in the wake of Algerian independence
may be said to constitute a ‘silence’ that lasted for some
thirty years. However, more recently, the interest shown in colonial
history by a new generation of French historians has served to rattle
several skeletons in the Algerian cupboard, and has thus made for a new
round of polemics. These include particularly Jean-Luc Einaudi’s La
Bataille de Paris (1991), an account of the events of 17 October 1961,
when the capital’s police force brutally, and, indeed, murderously,
suppressed a peaceful demonstration by Algerian men, women, and children.
The Paris Prefect of Police at this time was Maurice Papon, who was
subsequently convicted of crimes against humanity for his part in the
Vichy regime’s deportation of French Jews under the Occupation.
However, Papon could never be brought to court on charges relating to the
later incident because all crimes committed during the Algerian war had
been officially amnestied by de Gaulle in 1968. This measure had been
taken in return for the assurance by General Jacques Massu, by then in
command of French forces in Germany, that the army would support the
government in any show of force with the students and workers whose
combined agitation had brought France to the brink of revolution in May
and June of that year. In sharp contrast, Papon himself was able to launch
a case for defamation against Einaudi that culminated in 1999 in a
landmark decision in favour of the defendant: this served to demonstrate
that there could be as little doubt of Papon’s guilt in 1961 as there
had been in 1942. While ultimately unsuccessful, and even directly
counter-productive, Papon’s lawsuit was a powerful reminder of the
forces still at work in any discussion of the Algerian war.
By the same token, Services spéciaux: Algérie 1955-57,
a thoroughly unreconstructed account by General Paul Aussaresses of his
role in the torture and execution of FLN militants – or at least ‘suspects’
– during the Battle of Algiers, was to raise a storm of protest
nearly half a century after the events in question. Published first in
serial form in Le Monde in 2000, and then as a book in 2001, this
testimony was shocking both for its candour, and, above all, for its
author’s steadfast refusal to accept that he or his fellow soldiers
had ever done anything wrong. It was this that resulted ultimately in the
conviction of Aussaresses on 25 January 2002, not for war crimes (which
are specifically covered by the 1968 amnesty), but rather for ‘complicité
d’apologie de crimes de guerre’ [complicity in the justification
of war crimes]; for which he received a fine of 7,500 euros. As Jo
McCormack has commented in a recent survey of the significant body of
writing that continues to be produced on the use of torture during the
Algerian war: ‘One learns little [from Aussaresses] that had not
already been established, but the book provides a fascinating insight into
the mentality of the professional soldiers who fought in Algeria. Perhaps
what characterises his account the most is his cynicism and lack of
regret.’[21] Given the steadfast refusal to recant of Aussaresses,
and others like him – including particularly the exiled settlers of
Algeria, the pieds-noirs, and, crucially, their children and
grandchildren – ample scope for polemic must remain in French
attempts to engage with the Algerian question, even at this historical
remove.
While General Paul Aussaresses may, not unreasonably, be regarded as a
deeply unattractive figure, he may also, in his own way, be considered to
be a casualty of the Algerian war. More specifically, he may be looked
upon as just the latest victim of a broader French reluctance to engage
with this difficult period of the past. Since this ageing former officer
cannot be tried for the war crimes that, by his own admission, he
committed in Algeria, he has been convicted instead of telling his own
version of the truth. It goes almost without saying that a belief in the
author’s privileged access to historical ‘truth’ is a
prerequisite for any producer of polemic in the Algerian context, as in
any other, and this is certainly a perception that is shared as firmly by
Aussaresses as it is by his many detractors. Yet, in the final analysis,
soldiers in Algeria were only ever the executants of policies made in
Paris, rather than policy-makers. Thus, while their influence on the
military tactics used in Algeria was undoubtedly extensive, they could not
be, and cannot, be held primarily responsible for the broader political
strategy that had sent them to Algeria in the first place. Rather, many
figures in or near government could, and should, have been called to
account, with François Mitterrand – responsible with Pierre
Mendès-France for sending conscripts to Algeria in 1955, and
President of the Republic from 1981 to 1995 – the most obvious case
in point. Instead, France has for long preferred to hound those who ‘tell
tales’ about Algeria. The post-1962 consensus of silence on colonial
matters may, quite understandably, have been fuelled by a desire to
reassert national unity after this latest French experience of deep and
traumatic division. However, it was also encouraged by the prevailing
climate of materialism, consumerism, and individualism, as France turned
its back on its imperial past and towards a technocratic, Europe-oriented,
and, above all, more affluent future. So while the literary agitation that
accompanied France’s reluctant, and often brutal, retreat from
overseas empire may have reflected, and in turn helped to shape, a growing
disillusionment with the nation’s imperial pretensions, such artistic
interventions would not be so welcome after 1962. Henceforth, anger and
aggression would, pace Jules Roy, give way to the silence of
apathy, rather than that of a world-weary moral and political relativism.
Under the new orthodoxy, in fact, polemics would increasingly be reserved
for those, like the unappealing Aussaresses, who refuse to keep the
post-imperial peace.
[1] Kristin ROSS, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization
and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,
1996).
[2] This term has been used by several commentators, including
particularly John TALBOTT, The War Without a Name: France in Algeria,
1954-1962 (London: Faber, 1981); see also Patrick ROTMAN and Bertrand
TAVERNIER, La Guerre sans nom: les appelés d’Algérie,
1954-1962 (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
[3] David L. SCHALK, War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 110.
[4] Michel CROUZET, ‘La bataille des intellectuels français’,
La Nef, nos. 12-13 (October-January 1963), pp. 47-65; Bernard
DROZ, ‘Le case très singulier de la guerre d’Algérie’,
Vingtième siècle, no. 5 (January-March 1985), pp.
81-90; Pierre VIDAL-NACQUET, ‘Une fidélité têtue:
la Résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie’
Vingtième siècle, no. 10 (April-June 1986), pp.
3-18.
[5] TALBOTT, op. cit., p. 249.
[6] See particularly Annie CHHEN-SOLAL, ‘Camus, Sartre et la guerre
d’Algérie’, in Jean-Yves GUÉRIN, Camus et la
politique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), pp. 177-84.
[7] VIDAL-NACQUET, op. cit.
[8] James D. LE SUEUR, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity
Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 92.
[9] SCHALK, op. cit., pp. 69-70.
[10] LE SUEUR, op. cit., p. 105.
[11] Ibid., p. 110.
[12] Ibid., p. 111. [It is not without a certain repugnance that I give
my reasons like this in public. I have always condemned terror. I must
also condemn a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of
Algiers, for example, and which one day could strike my mother or my
daughter. I believe in justice, but I would defend my mother before
justice. (Le Sueur’s translation)]
[13] Albert MEMMI, ‘Camus ou le colonisateur de bonne volonté’,
La Nef (12 December 1957), pp. 95-6.
[14] SCHALK, op. cit., p. 4.
[15] LE SUEUR, op. cit., pp.113-21.
[16] Ibid., p. 120.
[17] Jules ROY, La Guerre d’Algérie (Paris:
Julliard, 1960), p. 215. [It is not a question of preferring one’s
mother to justice. It is a question of loving justice as much as one’s
own mother. (My translation)]
[18] LE SUEUR, op. cit., p. 125.
[19] TALBOTT, op. cit., p. 176.
[20] Jules ROY, Mémoires barbares (Paris: Albin Michel,
1989), p. 694. [They wanted a hatchet-man to take this general down a peg
or two, so I wrote a pamphlet like a toccata, then vaguely [...] waited,
still expecting that anything might happen, but nothing did. Little by
little, silence has overcome all the anger; all the aggression has burnt
out. No one knows now who is right or wrong, because each of us thinks
that the truth belongs to us. (My translation)]
[21] Jo McCORMACK, ‘Torture during the Algerian War’, Modern
& Contemporary France, Vol. 10, No. 3 (August 2002), pp. 392-5;
pp. 392-3 for the quotation.
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