READ THE PREVIOUS ENTRY - DE GAULLE AND SOUSTELLE - FRANCE IN THE LAND OF ISLAM
Up until the end of his days, Jacques Soustelle asked himself why General de Gaulle had given up on Algeria. He should have asked Couve de Murville. Or read Charles Maurras. This “great foreign policy”, that his Minister of Foreign Affairs told him about, is indeed the fundamental reason why de Gaulle made those choices. It’s foreign policy that determines domestic policy in his eyes. Not the opposite. And yet, this “great foreign policy” of the General is written in a few pages of Charles Maurras’ work, Kiel et Tanger, first written in 1985, taken back up and completed in 1910.
In 1972, during a famous conference in front of the Sciences Po students, President Pompidou pulled out, with admiration, a phrase from Kiel et Tanger, in which Maurras, prophetically, announced: “The world will therefore have the chance to represent itself for a long time... as a compound of two systems: several empires, with a number of nationalities, small or medium, in between. The world thus formed will not be the most peaceful. The weak will be too weak there, the powerful too powerful and the peace of one and the other will only rest on the terror that the colossi will have been able to inspire reciprocally. Mutual fear society, alternating bullying company, organized cannibalism!”
Naturally, at the time, Maurras did not know of the atom bomb, and Albert Einstein was barely born. He had nonetheless sensed the future, with these colossi who terrorize the world and France which is not one of them. What to do? Maurras proposed an alternative solution which he could summarize by a single word, influence: “… A France could maneuver by the sole fact that it would find itself, by its size and its structure, very fortunately established at equal distance from the giant empires and the dust of the little nations jealous of their independence. Circumstances are auspicious for the interposition of a State of medium size, robust and sturdy constitution such as ours… We will perhaps not have on the map the volume of greater powers: we will have moral authority founded on a superior living strength.
DE GAULLE ACTING AS MAURRAS ACTING AS VERGENNES
All the Gaullian “great policy” is announced. Even the most spectacular moments of the General, the most surprising ones, the most unexpected are already unveiled in it. Such was his Phnom Penh speech of 1967 against American intervention in Vietnam: “[One must] beware, in the other, the inevitable excess of hubristic policy to which the Germans, Russians, English, and Americans can henceforth no longer escape…” Or even his great speeches in Mexico (Marchemos la mano) or in Quebec (“Vive le Québec Libre!”): “And, if there is a tendency to believe that we are isolated, do remember all of which still speaks French or Latin in the world, the immense Canada and this infinite career which open to us the Central and Southern Asmericas! There is not the material which will refuse itself to French boldness.” Maurras himself had not invented anything, he gladly conceded it, but he had rediscovered the advice which Vergennes would give to King Louis XIV: “Assembling around you the secondary States, their enthusiasm and interest will guarantee their alliance, and she [France] will be at the front of a defensive coalition strong enough to push back all the ambitious.”
De Gaulle acting as Maurras acting as Vergennes. He implemented with African heads of state the methods which Louis XIV used with German kinglets. He tried to take back a foothold in the Middle East under the frame of a “great Arab policy.” The “third world” rocked into the disorder and confusion of the “non aligned”: it was not up to Nehru’s India or Nasser’s Egypt to take the lead of this league of wretches, but to De Gaulle’s France. The General reconnected with the ancient policy of France against “universal monarchy”, which he modernized by adjusting it against the “policy of blocs.” If he was also sensitive to the pressures exerting themselves on our country at the UN in regards to Algeria, it was not out of respect for the “thing”, but because the United States and the Soviet Union were taking advantage of it to put France on the spot with those who should be its friends, its allies, or its clients.
French Algeria is the lock which prevented him from deploying his “great foreign policy”; he will blow it up with dynamite, whatever the damages may be. The exile of the pieds-noirs and the massacre of the harkis will be the collateral damages that he would pretend not to see. When Alain Peyrefitte informs him at the Council of ministers that eight hundred thousand Frenchmen have sought refuge on the mainland, an icy silence permeates around the table, which de Gaulle snaps out of with a cold tone: “I’m wondering if you’re not exaggerating a little.”
In private, he accuses the OAS, that “sabotages the Évian accords”; then loses his temper in front of a Peyrefitte moved by the disarray of the pieds-noirs, and the vindictive and savage fury of their harkis co-religionists: “Don’t try to make me feel bad. This chapter has been as painful for me as for anyone else. But we’ve turned the page. It was necessary for the salvation of the country.”
“HIS SENTIMENTALITY HAS ATROPHIED ITSELF”
It is often believed that the cause of the insensibility of the General in regards to his spite against the pieds-noirs, was that he discovered them Pétainists in Alger in 1943, and in his refusal to have “Muslim Arabs” arrive incapable of assimilating on the mainland. That is true, but it comes in addition, superfluously. De Gaulle is in that Richelieu line of heads of state: public morality does not conform to the private one. It is even often dangerous that it does so. Their christian faith is sincere, but it does not apply to the rules of balance of powers in politics.
As of the 1950s, whereas de Gaulle was no longer in power and believed less and less in a comeback, Claude Guy made a wise observation on his great man: “I note once more the extent to which he is distant: renunciation to all sentimentality towards himself or over anyone else… I have arrived to that conclusion that, if what is around him does not affect him, it is because he does not care in the slightest to think of what is around him. It is only by accident that the living part of him, shifts, breathes, is moved, suffers, instinctively overwhelms him with ennui, and would be entirely trivial in his eyes. If there was no need to “try” his theses and sharpen his thoughts on his interlocutor, I believe that he would prefer to never see anyone… How many times have I heard him with enthusiasm aspire to the cell of a monk. This law weighs on his destiny. His sentimentality has atrophied itself.”
Pieds-noirs and harkis today; tomorrow the English, Czechs or Israelis: de Gaulle pushes aside everything that hinders at some point the implementation of his “great foreign policy.” He could not care less for the trampled feelings and crumpled passions. Even his most loyal supporters sometimes had sore muscles and bruises in their souls. When Malraux celebrates a bit too loudly during a Council of Ministers the “victory that constitutes Algerian independence”, the Prime Minister, Michel Debré, corrects: “A great victory over ourselves.”
When General de Gaulle announced his grand upheaval of alliances at the detriment of Israel, just as the French ally seemed in mortal danger on the eve of the Six-Day war of June 1967, François Mauriac wrote in his notebook: “Here is where perhaps I am badly defending myself from a certain discomfort: one feels too greatly that for de Gaulle, in this debate where it’s a matter of the survival of Israel, and of the destiny of the Arabs, he brings everything back to a question of the rank of France. But what of it! There is his vocation. He was only born, judging by the history of which he is the hero, for nothing else than the recovery of a vanquished nation to the position which it occupied before its defeat, and despite the atomic empires that have since emerged.”
But has he at least succeeded? Since the price to pay did not matter, were his choices crowned with success? Did Gaullian France manage to once again hoist itself to the rank of the giants of the planet? Armed with the atomic weapon and its third-world clientele, the dear and old country, without its ancient assets, a vast territory and a numerous population, which had made its strength not so long ago, had he succeeded to compensate what was lacking, to impose himself as the third great, and therefore to “recover the rank it had lost since Waterloo”?
To ask the question, is to answer it. You could of course, in the manner of enamored gaullists, accuse the French people of not being up to the vision that the great man had for France: “During these ten years, had French policy not held in a disproportionate effort to shape France in a certain image which a man held within him and that no longer corresponded with this old people out of breath?”
You could of course accuse his successors of faint-heartedness and betrayal. And yet, none of them, even his old opponent Mitterrand, had dared to openly disown his legacy, to the point that one even talks of a “gaullo-mitterrandian” foreign policy! All of them, even the least skillful, have tried just like their glorious predecessor to play on all frames, European integration and the independence of a great nation, the Western alliance and friendship with the third world.
But throughout the years, the “great foreign policy”, for which de Gaulle had sacrificed Algeria, has slowly but surely reduced itself to maintaining cliental links, more and more gangrened by business interests, the famous “Françafrique”, whereas the “Arab policy of France”, for which he had sacrificed Israel, limited itself to simple support for the Palestinian cause and the guarantee of oil supply. Even Quebec gave up on the independence which he had invited it to seize with panache, to drown itself in a large Canadian multicultural ensemble, thus announcing the tragic destiny of its unworthy mother, the return of this “great nation” of which de Gaulle had dreamed of, and which was transforming itself, it too, throughout the decades into a “beautiful province” attracting tourists emanating from the entire world, a sort of big Quebec in a Europe under German hegemony and in an americanized universe.
You can be sure that General de Gaulle would not have allowed himself to be trapped, “provincialized” in this tight geographic and symbolic perimeter. But had he left any choice to his successors? From the death of the General, Soustelle did not hesitate to rub salt on the wound: “France has spent itself in showering the third world countries with gifts, in the never fulfilled hope of constituting for itself a clientele of which it would be the leader.”
When the General left, the birdbrain made its entrance. At the announcement of the death of his old enemy, November 10th, 1970, Soustelle resided — the power of symbols! — in London, where he had lived out his forced exile. The men and Foccart’s barbouzes1 had pursued, tracked, and chased him for years, wherever he found refuge. He was treated as a pariah, a high criminal, whereas, contrary to tenacious legend, he had never been sentenced for his friendship with the OAS. Never sentenced, and therefore never pardoned. He returned to France after the death of the General and was even inducted into the Académie Française, where Jean Dutour, forever gaullist, gave beautiful reconciliatory praise: “A national tragedy had brought them together, another national tragedy had divided them.” Soustelle confided to friends that he regretted that death had deprived him of an explanation, perhaps even reconciliation, with his great enemy.
Time would give them the opportunity to find themselves again, History would wink at them ironically.
QURANIC FIRST NAMES
Starting in the 1970s, the arrival of populations coming from the Maghreb and Africa elicited once again burning questions which de Gaulle had thought were resolved for good. Soustelle lived long enough (he died in 1990) to see with pleasure his political family of origin reconnect with the concept that he had forged to save French Algeria: integration. This term found new youth: the leftist elites, in concert with Maghrebian families, refused to impose on them the rigorous precepts of republican assimilation. There was some trouble in defining with precision what exactly was integration, except for the fact that it wasn’t assimilation. These immigrants were implicitly allowed, in contrary with their Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish predecessors, to give their children “quranic” first names, to conserve many of their customs, even those which contradicted French traditions. “Mixing” and “miscegenation”2; almost as if we were pulling out of naphthalene the term “fraternization” between French and Arabs. The “big cat” had his revenge on the “Great Zohra”.
Soustelle passed in good time. He did not see his great idea of “integration” gradually liquify itself as populations coming from elsewhere packed themselves in French suburbs, chasing away the “native French” as well as descendants of European immigration, by the ostentatious affirmation of their way of life, and sometimes by the violence of delinquency. These neighborhoods lived more and more under the regime of a “de facto shariah” posited by the imams, most of them foreigners, and imposed by force by the “older brothers”; mixed marriages dwindled: the youth woudl go find their spouses with a willing cousin “in the old country”.
Soon, quranic first names would no longer suffice to affirm their identitarian pride: there would also be islamic dress, hijab for the women or djellabas for the men, quranic schools where the Arabic language was taught through recitation of the Quran’s verses, shops and supermarkets filled with “halal” products, cafés reserved for men, streets forbidden to women in short dresses or “indecent” attires. As the philosopher Rémi Brague, specialist of religions, explains: “Islam, behind all its varieties, is a jurisprudential system which presents itself of divine origin and where everything, therefore, is non-negotiable.”
If General de Gaulle came back to his “dear and old country”, to Saint-Denis or Saint-Étienne, to Roubaix or Marseille, and in so many towns and suburbs of the Hexagon, he could today as yesterday cry out in front of Alain Peyrefitte: “Let’s not delude ourselves! The Muslims, have you been to see them? Have you looked at them, with their turbans and their djellabas? You can see very well they’re not French! Those who advocate for integration are birdbrains even if they are very intelligent. Try to integrate oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. At some point they will separate once again. Arabs are Arabs, the French are French. You think the French body can absorb ten million muslims, who tomorrow will be twenty million and after-tomorrow forty?”
The two combatants had each won a battle, but they had both lost the war. Soustelle’s integration would prove each day more and more to be the myth that de Gaulle had denounced. But the General, by giving away Algeria “to the criminals of the FLN”, as Soustelle rightly said it, had first and foremost wanted to avoid his village becoming “Colombey-the-Two-Mosques”3. In 1970 there were a hundred mosques, five hundred in 1985, two thousand and three hundred in 2015!
ONE HUNDRED MILLION INHABITANTS
De Gaulle had sacrificed the Sahara and its oil, given up on making a “French lake” out of the Mediterranean, abandoned the elements of traditional strength — a vast territory and a France populated by one hundred million inhabitants — in order to avoid the demographic submersion of Islam. He had made his the modern conceptions of power: the atom bomb and industrial development; he had let go of the prey for the shadow. Fifty years after his death, the old powers come out of the hell of their past decadence thanks to the weight of numbers and the amplitude of their territories: reunified Germany in Europe is no longer the horse of which de Gaulle boasted to be the jockey; China, India, Turkey, perhaps even Nigeria or South Africa, or Brazil display the strength of their demographics at more than one hundred million people, and their cities of more than ten millions.
De Gaulle had refused to support an eternal war in Algeria, in the Israeli manner. The man who incarnated since June 18th, 1940, the honor and grandeur of France had traded the ancestral and vigorous values of the French army for the prosaism of economic development and consumerist materialism. He received, as punishment, a few years later, the hedonist and spiritualist revolt of a generation both coddled and pampered to whom he had spared the horrors of war, but which refused to “fall in love with a growth rate.”
The privileged relationships which he had nurtured with his “African clients” in the name of his “great foreign policy” favored the penetration of an African population, which enjoyed quite late, and thanks to the care of the old colonial power, an unheard of demographic explosion. At the same time, the Evian accords had planned to open in priority the doors of the Hexagon to immigrants coming from Algeria, even though the General had wanted to prohibit them entry, by separating them from the mother country!
One could no longer know, between French and African leaders, who exactly was the client and who was the patron; who was handling who. Oil and business interests, perhaps even corruption, rendered those links rather murky. Africans requested help from the French army when they were in danger, but refused to take back their nationals entering our soil illegally, and with no protests from French leaders.
THE BOX OF SORROWS REOPENS
Since the beginning of the 21st century, France has taken it upon itself to fight against the islamic offensive in Africa. It thus finds itself in its colonial role of protector of the black populations of the South of Africa against the descents coming from the Arabo-Islamic North; role which de Gaulle had thought he had gotten rid of by leaving Algeria; but by abandoning its role of advanced lookout of Christendom, it is its own territory that it has exposed to the Arabo-Muslim invasion.
The jihadist attacks have bloodied the country as the early symptoms of a new Algerian war. The historian Pierre Vermeren showed that most of the jihadists who attacked our soil were originally from the Rif, this Moroccan region who was first, in 1925, to revolt against the colonizer; rebellion that only Marshal Pétain had succeeded in quelling. The History of France always goes through the same dishes. The “box of sorrows” reopens. President François Holland confessed in private to journalists that he was convinced that “all of this would end in partition.” Oil and vinegar, had predicted the General. The birdbrains didn’t want to hear it.
The jihadist attacks have bloodied the country as the early symptoms of a new Algerian war. The historian Pierre Vermeren showed that most of the jihadists who attacked our soil were originally from the Rif, this Moroccan region who was first, in 1925, to revolt against the colonizer; rebellion that only Marshal Pétain had succeeded in quelling. The History of France always goes through the same dishes. The “box of sorrows” reopens. President François Holland confessed in private to journalists that he was convinced that “all of this would end in partition.” Oil and vinegar, had predicted the General. The birdbrains didn’t want to hear it.
In the “Algeria of daddy”, you could see it, the muslims could not obtain French citizenship because they had refused to abandon their “personal status”, namely their way of life regulated by these religious laws. Integration in the Hexagon had put priorities upside down and turned into a fool’s bargain: the Muslims, now French, had legally obtained the rights of any citizen; but nobody had predicted that many of them would return to their immemorial “personal status”.
In the end, they win out over Soustelle and de Gaulle. A counter-society forges slowly but surely a counter-people in the frame of a counter-colonization. Once again, the Republic finds itself in front of Islam, and still does not know how to cut the Gordian knot. Once again, the nation reconnects with its eternal demons of division, hatred between Frenchmen, civil war. In the name of integration and of French Algeria, Soustelle would have maintained us in a permanent war, cruel and degrading. With the independence of Algeria, de Gaulle gave us the respite of half a century, which was wrongly believed to last forever. Fifty years of peace, it’s a lot for a country always at war against its neighbors or against itself; but it is nothing in the grand scheme of History.
France seems condemned to relive over and over the same history, to relive over and over the same noxious passions. Regarding the period of the Occupation, Emmanuel Berl worte: “France, I’m afraid, is thus made so that the French do not know how to love it without hating a part of it, often even the majority of their compatriots; when they have not insulted it, disqualified it, proscribed it, incarcerated it, deported it, massacred it sufficiently to satisfy the demands of their zeal, they even accuse themselves of moderantism and indifference. A good Frenchman only views himself that way if he has caused death in hard periods, shame in calm periods, the ruin, the loss of a number of his compatriots suffices to calm his fear of not giving to his fatherland the love that he owes it. If he has not submitted to the inquisition, the police, the executioners, the gravediggers, other Frenchmen, his lack of fervor disgusts him of himself.”
When finally passions are appeased, when the history of Franco-french wars was shut with great pain, France invents its own woes. In the name of its humanist dream, its dream of universal love inherited from Rome and Christianity that pushes it to introduce politics in the real of sentiments, it forges on its own, by its mad ingenuity, its mad impetuosity, and its mad arrogance, the milestones of what will be its next civil war.
Relentless and tragic French destiny.
Counterinsurgents hired to fight the OAS in Algers
Note that the French term “métissage” does not have the same harsh biological connotations in common parlance today
De Gaulle’s village is called “Colombey-les-Deux-Églises”, Colombey-the-Two-Churches