De Gaulle and Soustelle - France in the land of Islam
From "Destin Français", by Éric Zemmour
READ THE PREVIOUS ENTRY - “DE GAULLE, THE MAN WHO MUST BE LOVED”
It would be the last one. The “der des der.”1 The ultimate franco-french war. The one which would resume all of them, contain all of them, repeat all of them, parodied them all. Tragedy and farce at the same time. The one which would confront the General and the intellectual, the Saint-Cyrian and the normalian2, the first of the French and the first at the philosophy examination, the catholic and the hughenot, the monarchist and the republican, the maurrassian and the socialist, the tall slender one and the big cat, the Great Zohra3 and the birdbrain4, the North wind and the Southern wind, the politician and the ethnologist, the 1940s exile and the 19560s exile, the cynic and the romantic, the machiavellian and the utopian.
Their names are Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Soustelle. One has the impression of having already met them, to have already known them, under other names, other traits, in other situations, never the same, but somehow always the same: Bonaparte and Chateaubriand, Napoleon III and Victor Hugo, Louis XIV and Fénelon, the wars of Religion and Montaigne…
“The franco-french war, declared by young France to the old France since the Revolution, the Restoration, and the Empire, has comically reappeared in the midst of the Dreyfus affair, to smother and rot under the flesh of the ‘died for’ of 1914-18, and will reappear in 1940-45 in the struggle between marshallists and generallists,” Guy Dupré remind us. “It shines its last glow in the 1960s between the Alger putsch and the Petit Clamart5. Sixty year old franco-french war which begins with the degradation of captain Dreyfus in the courtyard of the military school, on January 5th, 1985, and ends with the execution of colonel Bastien-Thiry at the Montrouge fort, March 11th, 1963.”
De Gaulle, like Soustelle, like all the actors of the ultimate struggle around French Algeria, are imbued by this story that haunts them. When Soustelle “buries” prematurely de Gaulle, “he dies at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises between 1951 and 1958 without us noticing it,” it’s in the bitter and sarcastic manner of the General signing the famous epitaph of the Marshal already mentioned: “Pétain died in 1925, unbeknownst to those who were not part of his entourage.” When all the partisans of Algerian independence, his old friends from the Left as well as his companions of the Resistance, brand him as a “fascist” because he supports the violent methods of the OAS6, Soustelle replies with a certain nobility: “If anyone that uses violence is a fascist, then we were fascists during the war.”
“INTEGRATION IS A TRAGIC BUFFOONERY”
It was the war which brought together these two men which had nothing in common. Soustelle joined General de Gaulle in London as of December 1940. He became there an essential piece of the apparatus, up to the point that he took charge of the secret services of Free France. The philosopher got his hands dirty; the intellectual flirted with politics; the man of the Left became a gaullist.
After the war, Soustelle continues to live all his lives at the same time. Between two trips to Mexico, and two ethnological works, he stabs the Fourth Republic with this sharp philippics. But when François Mitterand, then Minister of the Interior, offers him the governorship of Algeria, he is unable to refuse. He immediately consults de Gaulle, who emits “oh”s and “ah”s, before giving him: “After all why not! It is not a ministerial function, you could perhaps do something useful… Do it!” Soustelle then still believes himself to be the favorite of the great man whereas he has not forgiven him his circus act in January 1952, when he almost accepted the position of President of the Council offered by Vincent Auriol, thus precipitating the dissolution of the RPF group that supported the General’s political action.
He falls in love with Algeria: “Poor Algeria! Divided between the past and the future, torn apart by desires and bitterness. How could one not love her in her trials?” Algeria becomes enamored with him. On February 2nd, 1956, he would leave her as a Roman emperor, on a chariot. Soustelle would confide, despairing: “Algeria is lost.” He blames much on that Fourth Republic which was incapable of abandoning a short-term policy. The Republic would lose Algeria as it lost the Second World War, as it almost lost in 1914, because of the inability to govern of a parliamentary regime, incapable of making a decision, making choices, and hold onto them. His diagnostic thus joins General de Gaulle’s. When Soustelle dedicated his book Aimée et souffrante Algérie to him, de Gaulle replies that he “writes very well, which adds much to the arguments.”
The “big cat” finds himself in the middle of all the plots of May 13th, 1958. Operation Resurrection undertook three objectives: the return of the General to power, the reform of the institutions, and keeping Algeria within France. Soustelle later mentioned: “the contract signed between him and the nation after May 13th;” but de Gaulle claimed not to owe anything to anyone. In 1962, de Gaulle spoke of the movement of May 13th as “an usurpation project emanating from Alger.” Ingratitude of great men. Soustelle, Debré, Bidault. For Raymond Aron, sarcastically, here were the three last political leaders who still sincerely believe in French Algeria. They were also three gaullists and resistants of the first hour. “Jacques Soustelle’s integration is a tragic buffonery,” wrote Raymond Aron.
“LONG LIVE FRENCH ALGERIA”
De Gaulle still didn’t speak in that manner. In public, during his first trip to Algeria after his return to power, he expresses words which exalt and reassure: “I have understood you.” “All French Algerians are the same Frenchmen.” Not to forget: “Long live French Algeria!” The Algerian crowds exasperate him with their imperious sloppiness and their passion for Soustelle, whose name they do not stop chanting, but he still knew to contain his irritation.
In private, he was more temperamental depending on his audience, spoke of independence to progressives, of French Algeria to gaullists. When he received Léon Delbecque, great partisan of integration, on the eve of his departure to Alger and his famous “I have understood you,” he throws out, mockingly: “Integration, Delbecque, it never made sense.”
It is delicate to follow the meanders of his thinking. Beneath the apparent monolithic bloc, only twists and turns. Was it worth it to mock the zigzags of a Fourth Republic which varied with the majorities and the whims of the opinion of the mainland, and especially in Algeria! De Gaulle would take on the mantle of all the presidents of the Council, and all policies at the same time. He would successively defend French Algeria, Algeria within France, independent Algeria associated to France, Algerian Algeria.
He first thought, in good faith, that his immense personal prestige would convince the muslims to remain within France. At the time, only the King of Morocco dares to tell him that he is feeding himself with illusions. For French Algeria, he said the words that pleased, but also emptied his purse. It was the famous “Constantine plan”, vast project of education, industrialization, and construction. 150 billion francs per year! At the same time, he gave instructions to General Challe to crush the insurrection all the while offering the rebels the “peace of the brave.” De Gaulle pulls on all strings at the same time; and realizes that Algeria is becoming Danaid’s barrel. A well with no end. A bottomless pit. He confides to Peyrefitte: “Colonization has always brought on expenses related to sovereignty. But today, in addition, it brings on gigantic expenses relating to social and economic development. It has become, for the mainland, no longer a source of wealth, but a cause of impoverishment and slowing down. The civilizing mission, which was in the beginning but a pretext, has become the sole justification for the pursuit of colonization. But since it’s so expensive for us, why maintain it, if the majority of the population does not want it? It is a terrible drag. We must get rid of it. That is my mission. It is not a pleasant one.”
“And what about oil, and gas?" asks his counterpart.
De Gaulle sweeps away this ultimate argument:
”Oil and gas will not be enough to pay for the effort that the Algerians are demanding from us… The empires will fall one after the other. The smartest ones will be those who take care of the matter the quickest. The English, then the Dutch have been the first to get out; they've done well for themselves.”
“BYE, BYE, YOU’RE COSTING US TOO MUCH”
At the time, oil and gas were acquired at laughable prices. De Gaulle could not anticipate the 1873 crisis nor the quadrupling of the price of oil. His analysis nevertheless remains structural. The history of colonization is an immense deceit, whether written by its partisans or its opponents. Since the 20th century, as notes economic historian Paul Balroch, the countries which have no colonies, the United States, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, enjoy superior growth than those who do: the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands. By becoming a colonial power, in the beginning of the 20th century, Belgium switches camp. As soon as they abandon Indonesia, in 1947, the Netherlands benefit from unprecedented development. This “Dutch model” was analyzed at the time by all French economists who urged the General to abandon Algeria and the rest of the Empire.
De Gaulle did not have an economic culture, but he could count. Before Peyrefitte, he banters again: “Well then, since we cannot offer them equality, we must give them their liberty. Bye, bye, you’re costing us too much.” As of January 1959, he has changed track, and has decided to put an end to what he calls the “box of sorrows.” He writes to General Ely, head of the Armies: “We are in a situation where we need to kill a thousand combatants per month. The insurrection is intact… Integration is currently but a vain word, a sort of smoke-screen…” The General does not have a humanist a priori against colonialism. His son relates in his Mémoires a conversation in which his father threw out, exasperated: “Only imbecilic peoples do not recognize colonization for what it was, even if it was not always been tender due to their own barbarity. They forget that they were colonized in the first place because they themselves were incapable of it.” And of shouting out: “Long live the Romans!”
He nonetheless deems that the republican project in Algeria of assimilating colonized populations was “not very clever.” He does not appropriate himself the famous phrase of François Mitterand, then Minister of the Interior of the Fourth Republic: “Algeria, it’s France… from Flanders to the Congo, there is one law, one nation, one Parliament.” And yet he knows better than anyone that this Algerian dream was born with the Republicans to compensate for their military defeats in 1815 and the demographic sinking of the country in the 19th century. In their mind, Algeria was the antidote to the loss of the Napoleonic Empire in Europe. It would be what America was to England. Already, Thiers, in 1836, recalled for Algeria the destiny “of one of these great and noble azylums that in the 16th and 17th century one could find in North America.” Prévost-Paradol, in 1869, counted on Algeria to forge a France of a hundred million inhabitants which alone, according to him, could rival the giants which were on the rise: the United States, Russia, and what was called unified Germany.
ARAB KINGDOM
This republican project was universalist and humanist. It was a policy of the greatness of France founded on human rights. No races nor religions, one man, one Frenchman. Bugeaud and his officers learned their ropes in the Grande Armée. They were the children of the Revolution and of the Civil Code. The thought of converting to Catholicism the muslims they subjugate never crosses their mind. Certainly, they are merciless swordsmen; but, from the moment he seizes power, Napoleon III gave strict instructions so that the Arabs would not “know the fate of the American Indians.”
Unlike the republicans, the Emperor contemplated an Arab kingdom, independent, governed by the “muslim law,” but protected by the French army, where colonists would not be privileged against the indigenous populations; but where these would become French citizens by abandoning their “personal status”, namely the jurisprudential code of the Shariah. The imperial decrees of April 21, 1866, thus offered to Jews and Muslims, who were ready to abandon their “personal status”, the ability to acquire French nationality; but the religious authorities of both religions pressured their flocks to abandon this rather enticing offer. Four years later, the Republic, just newly established, would generalize this imperial policy, but only to the benefit of the Jews. In the meantime, the Israelite leaders of the mainland had exerted heavy pressure on the rabbis of overseas territories to submit. The imams, them, had not changed their minds
The defeat of 1870 placed this grand project in the dust bins of History. To the great desolation of De Gaulle, who, a hundred years later, still besides Peyrefitte, would pay it homage: “Only one understood in what dead end we were heading into: Napoleon III. He wanted an Arab kingdom… Europeans would not have been the dominators, but the leaven in the dough… We missed the only formula which could have worked.” A century later, the Muslim population would be ten million people, whereas its European counterpart added up to only a million. The die was cast. The pieds-noirs would never accept that Muslims receive the same rights as them, as it would mean submitting to the law of numbers.
ISLAM IS THE GORDIAN KNOT
Algeria would neither be North America, expunged of its first inhabitants, neither Mexico nor South America, where the Spaniards would mix with the Indians after having converted them to Catholicism. Islam is at the same time an identity, a religion, and a jurisprudential system. Islam is the gordian knot of this Algerian matter which France never dared to cut through.
Humanist and revolutionary France remained stranded midstream. Jacques Soustelle still wanted to believe in the “fraternization” of both peoples, the pied-noir and the Muslim. There was there some sentimental naiveté by Soustelle, that of the scholar seized by politics, when he calls his book on Algeria L’Éspérance trahie (Betrayed hope): as if the characteristic of political hope was to not be betrayed! But there is also great lucidity when he explains that the assassins of the FLN are first of all targeting their muslim coreligionists - and in the most savage manner - to impose on them the “domination of a group of racist, totalitarian, adventurers and of communist inspiration.”
Soustelle is too subtle an ethnologist to believe in the illusions of pure and simple assimilation - and in that way he is not the direct heir of Jules Ferry -, but he remains a republican of the Left who believes in Man. In the quarrel wielded with maestria by Joseph de Maistre in Considéerations sur la France (“There is no such thing as Man in the world. I saw in my life Frenchmen, Italians, Russians; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian; but as for Man I declare never to have met him in my life; if he exists then it is without my knowledge.”), de Gaulle is on the reactionary side of de Maistre, Soustelle is with the universalist revolutionaries for whom, as he will himself say, “there are no differences between a peasant of Cévennes and a kabyle pesant.” Note however that he is talking about Kabyles - berbers converted by force to Islam, centuries earlier - and not Arabs. Completely in his romantic Mexican mirage, he only forgets that in 130 years of colonization there has practically not been any mixed marriages between pieds-noirs and Arabs.
De Gaulle, on the other hand, is of a ruthless realism: “You can integrate individuals; and up to a certain point only. You do not integrate peoples, with their past, their traditions, their shared memories of victorious or lost battles, their heroes. You think that between pieds-noirs and Arabs, it will ever not be the case? You think they have the feelings of a common fatherland, able to overcome all divisions of races, classes, religions? You really think they have the will to live together?”
De Gaulle had been visited by the great French demographer Alfred Sauvy, who exposed to him his uncompromising graphs. The General gives Peyrefitte his lesson: “Have you ever thought about the fact that Arabs would multiply by five then ten, while the French population would remain almost stationary? There would be two hundred then four hundred Arab deputies in Paris? Can you imagine an Arab President at the Élysée?”
“THE SAME DJEBELS7, THE SAME HALF-STARVED WRETCHES”
In the beginning of 1960, everyone had finally understood that de Gaulle would not be the one that they thought he would be. The army has finally understood. The army, especially, understood. Massu, in January 1960, pours out in a German newspaper: “Our biggest deception has been to see General de Gaulle become a man of the Left… de Gaulle was the only man we had. The army has perhaps made a mistake.” He paid the price. Massu is summoned to the Élysée: “General de Gaulle hit the table, he broke his watch, he was warm, he had a sticky hand,” said Massu of his meeting with the General. Massu replied that Napoleon at least allowed his grognards to speak and concluded: “You’re surrounded by a bunch of twats.”
For the officers of the Army of Algeria, in particular the colonels who were fighting besides their men and knew that they were winning the war on the field, by avenging the bitter defeat of Diên Biên Phu, the disillusion was immense. The anger also. For them, from now on, de Gaulle was Pétain. The hero of yesterday’s war who gave up on the struggle of today. The man of honor who betrayed his given word. The incarnation of all supreme values of sacrifice who made himself into the herald of a slumped and weakened France.
During the week of the barricades in Alger, in January 1960, the situation is tense even within the government. During the Council of ministers, Malraux throws out: “After all, we have tanks, why don’t we use them?” Soustelle replies with cold irony: “The atomic bomb is completely ready at Regane, why don’t we use it either in Alger?”
Soustelle no longer has his place in the government. He resigns. De Gaulle receives him one hundred and fifty seconds.
Later, on television, in 1989, Soustelle would relate the scene: “In substance, he told me that our positions were too different to be able to remain together, indeed. I told him it is too bad you did not wait a few more days, it would have been twenty years that I’d been with you. He made the gesture that one does to send a fly away.”
During the referendum on auto-determination of January 8th, 1961, de Gaulle secures a yes with 75.25% on the mainland. De Gaulle won. And yet, nothing went how he wished it. Nothing went as fast as he wished it. The FLN’s envoys turned out to be ruthless negotiators. They would not let anything go, and especially not that Sahara, with its oil reserves discovered by the French, who were running experiments there on their atomic bomb. Exasperated, he thinks of a novel exit: partition. Regroup the Europeans, of which three quarters already lived near the coast, between Alger and Oran. With the Sahara in an autonomous Republic, directly tied to French Algeria. He confided to Peyrefitte: “The important thing for a minority, it’s to be a majority somewhere… The two million Israelis did manage to hold themselves in front of the hundred million Arabs which surround them.” He instructed him to spread the idea. Articles, columns, meetings, seminars.
The partisans of French Algeria, like Debré, attach themselves to the idea as the last raft before the drowning. Couve de Murville and Malraux predict his failure to Peyrefitte. Malraux: “It is likely that your formula would mean to pursue the war in another form, which would be for us supporting someone else, but it would still be a war.” Couve is even more hostile: “It is impossible that Morocco and Tunisia be independent but Algeria not so. It’s the same djebels, the same half-starved wretches, the same intelligentsia that we trained and that hates us.”
Alain Peyrefitte would never know if he had been used by the General to press the sword in the kidneys of the FLN’s negotiators or if de Gaulle had really believed in his “partition” plan. No doubt it was both. His contempt for the pieds-noirs, as for most of the mediterranean “populace”, inclines him to see in the crowds of Alger and Oran raucous screamers, incapable of taking up arms to defend their territory. What was the background idea became tactical means, and vice versa, depending on the need.
As always with de Gaulle, everything depended on the timing.
French expression attributed to the First World War, short for “dernière des dernières”, the last of the last.
Saint-Cyr is short for École Spéciale Militaire Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan, a military academy founded by Napoleon which continues to train the future officers and military elite of the country. A highly prestigious institution which De Gaulle attended. “Normalien” is an expression denoting someone who attended the École Normale Supérieure, a highly elitist school with rigorous and competitive admissions. It dates back to the end of the 18th century, and had in its ranks people such as Laplace, Lagrange, Bergson, Taine, etc
“La Grande Zohra” was a derogatory term used by French Algerians to disparage De Gaulle. It was also the codename used by the OAS for him. “Zohra” is a common Maghrebian name, usually with a connotation of a middle aged woman, with all the stereotypes that come with such things.
De Gaulle used the expression “cervelle de colibri” to mock those who wanted the “integration” of Algerians.
Assassination attempt targeting General de Gaulle in 1962
Organisation Armée Secrète
Djebel is a loanword from the Arabic جبل, meaning “mountain”