CHAPTER TWO Ici, c’est la France

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire
and little minds go ill together.
Edmund Burke, On Conciliation with America, 1775
The country
SETTING the scene for the quite irrational murder of the anonymous Arab by
his pied noir anti-hero, “The Outsider”, that great native-born writer of Algeria,
Albert Camus, paints in words that scorch the mind:
There was the same red glare as far as the eye could reach, and small waves
were lapping the hot sand in little, flurried gasps. As I slowly walked
towards the boulders at the end of the beach I could feel my temples
swelling under the impact of the light. It pressed upon me, trying to check
my progress. And each time I felt a hot blast strike my forehead, I gritted
my teeth, I clenched my fists in my trouser-pockets and keyed up every
nerve to fend off the sun and the dark befuddlement it was pouring into me
… all I had to do was to turn, walk away, and think no more about it. But
the whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back.
He goes on, kills, and accepts — inarticulately and impassively — the penalty of
the guillotine.
Environment shapes men, and none more so than the vast skies of Algeria —
generally blazing down without pity or moderation, but capable of unpredictable,
fierce change. Immense, beautiful, sudden, savage and harsh; one gropes
inadequately for the right adjectives to describe the country. Distance never
ceases to amaze; from Algiers to Tamanrasset in the barren, lunar mountains of
the Hoggar is 1,300 miles, or roughly the same as from Newcastle to Algiers;
from Algiers to Oran, a flea’s hop on the map of North Africa, is little short of
300 miles by road. Four times as big as metropolitan France, with its land area
unchanged since the colonial era, present-day Algeria is the tenth largest country
in the world. Nine-tenths of it are comprised by the endless Saharan under-belly
that sags below the Atlas mountains, the endless wasteland of blistering rock and
shifting sand. Sparsely inhabited by troops of wandering nomads, or exotic tribes
like the Ouled-Nail, whose comely dancing daughters traditionally used to offer
themselves as courtesans in other regions, then returned with rich dowries to
transmute themselves into honoured wives, dotted with mysterious M’zabite
cities such as Ghardaia, and policed by isolated Foreign Legion forts, the Sahara
once formed the average Englishman’s romantic Beau Geste image of all
Algeria. It is a world of seizing visual beauty, of shimmering whites and yellows
that shift to glowing apricot, pink and violet with the sinking of the saturant sun.
“A magnificently constructed Cubist painting,” was how an enraptured Simone
de Beauvoir saw Ghardaia: “white and ochre rectangles, brushed with blue by
the bright light, were piled on each other to form a pyramid.…” Few French
soldiers remained impervious to its dangerous allures, yet this great backyard
seemed real estate without value — until, during the Algerian war itself,
discovery was made of the vast reserves of natural gas and oil that were to
provide the basis of the wealth of independent Algeria.
For all its immense scale, the Algerian scene shifts with unexpected rapidity.
Within a few hours’ drive northward from the desert oasis of Bou-Saada, you are
up in the 7,000-foot Atlas range of the Djurdjura, where (as I once discovered to
my cost) even as late as mid-May roads can be blocked or swept away by
avalanches and landslides. Beyond the mountains lies a totally other world. The
hundreds of miles of rugged, indented coastline where the Barbary pirates had
their lairs is the true Mediterranean; but a Mediterranean where secret, sandy
bays are often pounded by seas of Atlantic force. Parts of it, like the aptly named
Turquoise Corniche, are as breathtaking as the Amalfi peninsula but without its
hordes and hoardings. There is the beguiling Roman site of Tipasa, on its gentle
promontory where “the sea sucks with the noise of kissing”, drenched at midday
by the scent of wild absinthe, and where Camus repeatedly experienced “the
happy lassitude of a wedding-day with the world”. In springtime the ruins are a
blaze of contrapuntal colour: wild gladioli of magenta, bright yellow inulas and
spiky acanthus thrust up among sarcophagi carpeted with tiny blue saxifrage and
sprawled over by convolvulus with great pink trumpets. The ochre stones and
iron red soil contrast joyously with the silvery-grey of the olives and absinthe
and a peacock sea. “Here the gods themselves serve as tryst-places, or beds,”
says Camus. “Happy is he among the living who has seen such things.” And
happy, indeed, were the pieds noirs who, in the “good days” owned summer
villas — such as one might find in Brittany or Arcachon — at Tipasa or on other
stretches of Algeria’s unspoilt coastline.
Pied noir Algeria
The centre of gravity of French colonisation lay close to the coast, with its big,
Europeanised city ports of Algiers, Oran, Bougie, Philippeville and Bône, and
the Mitidja — the rich, flat farmland which French ingenuity had created out of
malarial swamps. Here, in country which might have been Languedoc, straight
eucalyptus-shaded roads led through a prosperous and tidy succession of cereal
and citrus farms, drenched with orange-blossom scent in May, and vast
vineyards, owned by pieds noirs and operated by Muslim labour. The Mitidja
towns — like Blida, where Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and André Gide
once vied for the charms of “Arab boys as beautiful as bronze statues” — were
unmistakably French. Their main squares, surrounded by well-pollarded plane
trees (as well as containing the inevitable, graceless monument aux morts) would
almost invariably boast a highly ornate bandstand where, of a Sunday, the band
of the local garrison would endeavour to distract the indigènes from their lack of
more worldly privileges with rousing martial music. The names of the townships
founded by the colons were just as uncompromisingly French; Victor-Hugo,
Rabelais, Orléansville, Aumale, Marengo and Inkermann.
Algiers itself, cradled in steep hills green with pine and palm that offer
countless superb panoramas, was one of the pearls of French Mediterranean
culture. Arriving by ship in its bay — which, next to Rio, must be one of the
most beautiful in the world — one’s eyes were blinded by the massed whiteness
of the terraces climbing up from the sea. It deserved its sobriquet of Alger la
Blanche. High above Algiers on one side was perched Notre Dame d’Afrique, a
Catholic shrine of prime sanctity for the pieds noirs (and also of appalling taste,
a little reminiscent of Montmartre’s Sacré-Cœur), containing a black madonna
with the paternalistic inscription “Pray for us and our Muslims”. On another hill
nestled the luxurious Hôtel Saint-George, where General Eisenhower set up his
Allied Headquarters in 1942, and through whose exotic gardens of giant
contorted euphorbia and sweet-smelling moonflowers Churchill and the titans of
the Second World War strolled, laying plans for a world in which Anglo-Saxon
predominance seemed assured in perpetuity.[1] After the war it reverted to being
a haven for senior French officials, high army brass and their ladies. Just down
the hill from the Saint-George lay the Palais d’Été, a dazzling white mauresque
mansion where the governor-general resided in full viceregal splendour. Once
the centre of Algiers was the Place du Gouvernement, close to the harbour
whence creep fishy smells, and where the corsairs used to auction their slaves;
but the true solar plexus (and certainly in the years after 1954) was formed by
the Plateau des Glières, leading up from the sea, past the palatial Hôtel des
Postes, up steep steps to the imposing monument aux morts and thence to the
open space, or Forum, in front of the modern block that housed the offices of the
Gouvernement-Général.
With its waterfront of grand prosperous arcaded buildings belonging to the
banks, big mercantile companies, the Hôtel Aletti and the Écho d’Alger, its redtiled bourgeois villas gazing out over the bay, this could easily have been Nice or
Cannes. Yet of its total population of 900,000 only one-third was in fact
European. In their different enclaves the two communities coexisted closely
together — which, in time of peace, was to provide Algiers with its most
fascinating contrasts, and, later, its most savagely bloody collisions. The elegant,
thoroughly French boulevards of Rue Michelet and Rue d’Isly, with their
expensive shops and trottoir cafés thronged with chattering students, terminated
abruptly in the Casbah. This, the old Turkish quarter, embraced in its compressed
and nigh-impenetrable confines, redolent with all the odours of spice and oil of
any Arab city and resounding with its ululations, a totally Muslim population
bursting at the seams. The squalid, labyrinthine alleys often concealed ancient
houses built around open courtyards of great charm. Abutting the Casbah on the
other side lay the tenements of the European working class of Bab-el-Oued, so
heavily impregnated with Spanish blood that its inhabitants were known
collectively as the “Hernandez-and-Perez”. At the opposite, south-east, end of
Algiers, in the seedier pied noir quarter of Belcourt, the boundary between the
poor whites and their Muslim counterparts was still less distinct.
The summer in Algiers is long and torrid, and by the end of it the Europeans
tend to feel like fruits that have ripened too long in the sun. Tempers fray, until at
last the potent September rains bring liberation and new life. Through much of
the year — winters that sparkle and springs that warm — the climate, like the
architecture, is that of the northern Mediterranean. Then, suddenly, with the least
warning, the sky yellows and the Chergui blows from the Sahara, stinging the
eyes and choking with its sandy, sticky breath. Men think, and behave,
differently. It is a recurrent reminder that this is indeed Africa.
Oran, the second city of Algeria, was even more European than Algiers; in
fact, with 300,000 pied noir inhabitants to 150,000 Muslims, it was the only
centre where they predominated. The scene of the Royal Navy’s tragic action to
sink the French fleet in 1940, rather than risk it falling into Nazi hands, Oran
was to suffer but little until the last days of the Algerian war. Camus condemns it
as a city of ineffable boredom, where the youth had but two essential pleasures
— “getting their shoes shined and displaying those same shoes on the
boulevard” — and found its streets “doomed to dust, pebbles and heat”, its shops
combining “all the bad taste of Europe and the Orient”. To him, while Algiers
had an Italian quality, Oran with its “cruel glitter” had something more Spanish
about it; and Constantine reminded him of Toledo. But, he added harshly, in
contrast to those of Italy or Spain, “These are cities without a past. They are
cities without abandon, without tenderness. In the hours of boredom which are
those of the siesta, the sadness there is implacable and without melancholy.…
These cities offer nothing to reflection and everything to passion.…”
Kabylia and the Aurès
In a country full of violent contrasts none could be greater than that between
the Mediterranean littoral with its Europeanised cities, beaches and flat,
cultivated hinterland, and the almost entirely Muslim-populated wild mountain
massifs of the Aurès and Kabylia. Separating Constantine from the desert, the
Aurès is a land of savage, inhospitable grandeur with Algeria’s highest peaks
occasionally (and surprisingly) relieved by a few fertile strips along the floors of
narrow canyons, and an occasional forest dense with scrub oak and entangling
ivy. Of spring in one such oasis, El-Kantara, André Gide writes lyrically:
the apricot trees were in bloom and humming with bees; the waters were
out and irrigating the fields of barley; nothing more lovely can be imagined
than the white blossoms of the apricots overshadowed by the tall palm
trees, and themselves, in their turn, overshadowing and sheltering the bright
tender green of the young crops. We passed two heavenly days in this
paradise, and they left me no memory that is not pure and smiling.
But for the most part the Aurès is a treeless wilderness where it looks as if
nothing but stone will grow. Even the shallow graves of the native Chaouias are
marked only with jagged splinters of rock. The square dwellings of the villages
that nestle on top of unassailable mountain spurs are built of the same ochreous
stone, the only material available, and thus blend with such perfect camouflage
into the natural backdrop as to be all but invisible from below. Searingly hot
summers are succeeded almost immediately by the cutting winds of winter, and
the Aurès has long suffered perhaps the most woeful poverty of all Algeria.
Equally like the north-west frontier of India, which it closely resembles, it has
from time immemorial been a land of unvanquishable guerrillas and banditry.
Kabylia in springtime is surely one of the last unspoilt, bucolic paradises of
this world. Cornfields are pink and azure with wild flowers spared the tidy
rapacity of English herbicides; the foothills to its rugged mountain chains blaze
with saffron masses of wild broom, or are shaded by groves of smoky blue
cedars or dense forests of cork and Spanish chestnut reminiscent of the
hinterland of the Alpes Maritimes. Clear streams burble through poplars that
sing with the loving calls of doves, or tumble forcefully through rocky gorges as
savage and beetling as the floor of the Grand Canyon. Above it floats the great
jagged spine of the Djurdjura, mantled with winter snows till early summer.
Riddled with caves, Kabylia is ideal country equally for ambushes and for
guerrillas to melt away when hunted. In many ways it could be called the
Scotland of Algeria but, in contrast to most highland or alpine countries whose
villages crouch for shelter in the valleys, Kabylia’s white-walled and terracotta
tiled douars perch defiantly atop razor-backed ridges. They are a reminder of a
turbulent history when safety from raiders, floods or landslides often lay in the
high ground — as well as providing the traveller with one breathtaking
panorama after another, since the tortuous roads follow the line of the villages.
But the lyrical beauty of Kabylia is deceptive. Like so much of Algeria, it has a
stern ecology. The stony outcrops are often covered but thinly with arable soil;
winters are bitingly cold, and rainfall scanty and unpredictable. In relation to its
fertility, Kabylia had also become the most acutely over-populated region of
Algeria.
Whether it was the vast bled (as the French army called the outback) of desert,
mountains, pasture and vineyards, or the cities and beaches, on French
administrators and soldiers alike the country as a whole produced a curiously
intoxicating effect. As the man who was to sign the settlement finally
terminating the présence française there, Louis Joxe, remarked to the author:
“Algérie montait à la tête.”
Kabyles and Arabs
The Muslim native of Algeria can trace his origin back to a multiplicity of
racial and tribal stocks — Kabyle, Chaouia, M’zabite, Mauretanian blacks,
Turkish and pure Arab — producing some particular and some general
characteristics. The oldest inhabitants are the Berbers of Kabylia and the Aurès
who, like their kinsmen in the Moroccan Atlas, fell back into the mountains
under pressure from first the Roman, then the Arab, invaders. Together they
comprised (in 1954) the largest proportion of the Muslim population. But
probably less than a third still retained their separate identities of language and
culture, the rest being rated by ethnologists as Arabised Berbers. Among
themselves, the Kabyles have difficulty understanding the dialect of their
kinsmen in the nearby Aurès, and have different customs. For instance, although
in contrast to the Arab women with their more sombre clothing and faces
concealed behind the haik both the Kabyles and Chaouias traditionally walk
outside without the veil, in boldly coloured foutahs and often wearing exquisite
necklaces of silver and coral, the Chaouia woman keeps possession of her dowry
and plays a forceful role in married life; privileges which were not to be found in
Kabylia. The Berbers through history have been a warlike and unruly people; as
far back as 950 B.C. they are chronicled as fighting the Pharaohs on the Nile;
they provided two Roman Emperors, Septimus Severus and Caracalla, and were
with the vanguard of the Muslim conquest of Spain. But they tended to be as
unsuccessful at ruling as being ruled. Revolt, and revenge in the Corsican
fashion, were honoured occupations from time immemorial. Like the Scots they
are a people imbued with intense national and regional pride; they are not great
smilers, but if you tell a Kabyle waiter in Algiers that you have been to TiziOuzou, his face will explode with pleasure. Jean Amrouche, the Kabyle writer,
characterises his people as swinging between extreme enthusiasm, when inspired
by an idea, and an apathetic withdrawal when that idea has lost its charm.
In the past, the Kabyle and the Arab had little love for each other, and — in
the best colonial tradition — it was often the policy of French administrators to
set one off against the other. More orthodox in religion than the Kabyles, the
Arabs were at the same time perhaps more supple in their mental processes, and
shrewder businessmen. As townsmen and lowlanders they had had the most
contact with French culture, and had also suffered, directly, the most in that it
was largely their patrimonial lands that had come within the grasp of the colons.
Nevertheless, at the risk of generalisation one can isolate certain “Algerian”
characteristics shared by Kabyle and Arab alike. “Here everything is rock, even
the men — as if, like the land on these slopes, they were lacking in some
essential grace,” wrote Jules Roy, a pied noir deeply sensitive to the Muslim
predicament. He was thinking specifically of Kabylia, but it might have applied
equally to other Algerians. Like the soil, they are dour, uncompromising,
sometimes harsh — and capable of extreme cruelty. In contrast with the sunny
volubility of the Tunisian, the subtlety and humour of the Cairene, they are the
Aberdonians of North Africa. “The Algerian mentality is characterised by the
right-angle. There are no contours or compromises,” explained the Algerian
leader, Abderrazak Chentouf, to an American professor. Complexe et complexé,
the Algerian is allured by ceremony, military parades and decorations (a
susceptibility readily exploited by the Europeans), but at the same time
antipathetic to any showy, “cult of the personality” leadership (a Bourguiba
would never hold sway in Algeria). He is distrustful by nature, reluctant to place
himself under the authority of another — and exceptionally secretive. The
Algerian male prides himself on a sense of courteous dignity and reserve —
while, in praise of the essential toughness of the Algerian woman, Jules Roy
remarks: “They do not betray, nor do they forgive. More easily than one
supposes, the men sell their brothers.… But not the women, who are incapable
of subterfuge, except in love.…” All these were characteristics that were to
display themselves with emphatic relevance from 1954 onwards.
The Muslim Algerian and the pied noir communities were separated by a wide
gulf that was at once religious, cultural and economic. Solid friendships could
exist between the two but seldom matured into anything more intimate because,
says Jacques Soustelle, ethnologist and future governor-general: “the traditional
status of the Muslim woman, recluse and veiled, hindered families from getting
together, from households entertaining each other.” There was a fundamental
divergence of orientations: when the pied noir went on holiday he made for the
beach, and instinctively he gazed out over the Mediterranean towards Europe. In
contrast, the Arab or Kabyle would head for the cool verdure of the mountains or
the desert oases; he looked inland, towards the land-bound heart of Africa. Yet a
number of qualities united the two peoples — at least in the eyes of metropolitan
Frenchmen, or other Europeans. There was, noted a dispassionate Swiss
journalist, Henri Favrod: “the same energy, the same indolence, the
grandiloquence, the enthusiasm, the gambling instinct, the dressiness, the sense
of hospitality, the arrogance of the male, the respect for the mother”. He might
have added the common temperament of passion, and indeed violence.
The pieds noirs
The diverse origins of the pieds noirs have already been noted. By 1917 it was
estimated that only one European in five was of true French descent (and these
included Corsicans and Alsatians), and in the 1950s you could still hear more
Spanish than French spoken in the poorer quarters of Oran. Arriving, many of
them, under the Second Empire, these Spaniards had adapted themselves readily
to the climate and had proved perhaps the best workers on the land. Then there
were the Italians who, like most of the Spaniards, had come with empty pockets
and with little more than the hope of an Eldorado where either work or land
would be readily available. They were artisans, builders, miners and fishermen.
There were the Maltese who, being Catholic and speaking a language akin to
Arabic, had a foot in both camps and established themselves swiftly as a class of
petits commerçants. Of the French, apart from the Alsatians of post-1870, most
came from the climatically similar Midi; especially after the phylloxera had
wiped out the vineyards there. If there was one single common denominator for
the pieds noirs, they were, in the expression coined by the French army,
mediterranéens-et-demi. It was an important factor in understanding their
motives and behaviour from 1954 onwards.
The pieds noirs had developed some of their own peculiar customs, some
borrowed from the Muslims. There was the traditional outing on Easter Monday,
a picnic centred around the ceremonial “breaking of the mouna”, a hemispheric
and sickly sweet cake scented with orange-blossom. But essentially their life and
pleasures were those of the true Mediterranean being: the old women knitting
and gossipping on shaded park benches, the men arguing and story-telling over
the long-drawn-out pastis outside the bistros; the protracted silence of the siesta;
then the awakening in the cool of the evening, the games of boule in dusty
squares, under trees populated with revivified and chattering birds. It was a good
life, with not too many cares. For the affluent there was the Algiers Yacht Club,
the Golf Club, the Club Anglais and the Club Hippique, and skiing up at Chréa
in the winter; for the petits blancs of Algiers there was the racecourse at
Hussein-Dey and football at the Belcourt stadium. The heavy red wine of
Algeria was both plentiful and cheap, and above all there was the beach. “The
Outsider” of Camus, who perhaps personifies the pied noir mentality better than
any other fictional character, describes his anguish of privation while in prison,
awaiting the guillotine:
I would suddenly be seized with a desire to go down to the beach for a
swim. And merely to have imagined the sound of ripples at my feet, and
then the smooth feel of the water on my body as I struck out, and the
wonderful sensation of relief it gave, brought home still more cruelly the
narrowness of my cell.
On the beaches nearest Algiers, the young of the poorer whites would spend
their entire week-end splashing joyously in the sea, then dancing under the stars
to the music of a juke-box. The slang they used — se taper un bain, “indulge in
a swim”, rather than “go for a swim” — was perhaps suggestive of the sheer
sensuality of their attachment to the sea.
“I learned not to separate these creatures bursting with violent energy from the
sky where their desires whirl,” says Camus of his fellow pieds noirs. The sea and
sun, these were factors that were all-conditioning, responsible for their best as
well as their worst characteristics. In contrast to the Cartesian rationale in which
the northern Gaul so prides himself, the meridional pied noir was first and
foremost a creature of the senses. Everything was excess: excessive exuberance,
excessive hospitality, excessive affection — and excessive hate. “Stopping to
think and becoming better are out of the question,” claims Camus. “The notion
of hell, for instance, is merely a funny joke here. Such imaginings are allowed
only to the very virtuous. And I really think that virtue is a meaningless word in
all Algeria.…” Under the implacable sun the pied noir married young and was
burnt out young. For as well as nurturing and stimulating life, the sun society
also caresses death. It was quite customary for a murderer — whatever the rights
or wrongs of his case — to be referred to, compassionately, as “the poor fellow”,
and the acceptance of violence and death lay never very far beneath the surface.
Among his pieds noirs, Camus himself was mystically aware of a “merciless
tête-à-tête with Death, this physical fear of the animal who loves the sun”. The
conditions of Algerian life bestowed upon the European there a sense of
mortality, of transience, which, writing even before the Second World War,
Camus was able to discern in some remarkably prophetic passages:
he is born of this country where everything is given to be taken away …
here is a race without past, without tradition … wholly cast into its present
lives without myths, without solace. It has put all its possessions on this
earth and therefore remains without defence against death. All the gifts of
physical beauty have been lavished on it. And with them, the strange
avidity that always accompanies that wealth without failure.…
The sentiments of the pied noir towards metropolitan France (for so many not
their mother country at all) were compounded of resentment, love, disdain and
an inferiority complex with the undertones of superiority that so often
accompany it. For “The Outsider”, Paris was “A dingy sort of town, to my mind.
Masses of pigeons and dark courtyards. And the people have washed-out white
faces.” The women of Bab-el-Oued found it hard to understand how, without a
“true sun”, the laundry would ever dry in Paris. If the pied noir loved France, it
was with a love that sought constant reassurance: “The French of Algeria would
like to be reassured that…” was a theme frequently to be found in Press
editorials. For his part, he felt that he had well deserved France’s love through
his sacrifices in two world wars. “Where is our promised land?” one of the rebel
generals of 1961, Edmond Jouhaud, was to demand: “I think we have paid for
the right to be French, by the blood that we shed from 1914 to 1918 and from
1939 to 1945.” It was an argument with which Britons were made familiar early
in the Rhodesian crisis. Perhaps because so many pieds noirs, or their
antecedents, had come to Algeria after a vie manquée in Europe, there was a
residual misgiving that the metropolitan Frenchman regarded him as a secondclass European, and this inferiority complex could manifest itself in a display of
extreme sensitivity: “the least reserve about the climate is to say that their
mistress is one-eyed,” comments Pierre Nora sardonically; “to permit a remark
about their manner of overtaking an automobile and running over pedestrians is
an insult to their virility.…” Again, it was an attitude that some Britons may at
times have encountered in countries of the old Commonwealth, and its inversion
was an isolationist, separatist sense of superiority that could vest the pied noir
with a vastly over-inflated notion of his own weight in world councils. With a
feeling of just pride the pieds noirs recalled that, in 1914, it was Bône and
Philippeville that had drawn the first German naval salvoes; and, once more,
Camus seems to strike a chord of utmost fidelity when, at the conclusion of The
Outsider, he reveals that the last wish of his anti-hero was to occupy the centre
of the stage: “for me to feel less lonely, all that remained was to hope that on the
day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they
should greet me with howls of execration”.
At the time of the projected Blum—Viollette reforms, a pied noir financier
remarked to Viollette: “Monsieur le Gouverneur-Général, you reason in the
French of France, but we reason in the French of Algeria.” It was not at all the
same language, as was to become tragically plain later, and in order to
understand events from 1954 onwards it is necessary to accept the existence of
three totally distinct peoples — the French of France, the French of Algeria, and
the Muslims of Algeria.
In the outer world, the most obvious kinsmen to the pied noir are the whites of
South Africa, Rhodesia and the “Deep South” of the United States. In terms of
the numbers of generations that had come to regard Algeria as “home”, and had
absolutely nowhere else in the world to go, he stood somewhere between the
Afrikaaner and the Rhodesian. At the opposite ends of the social scale,
comparisons in their way of life and attitudes could be made between the grands
colons and the plantation owners of the “Old South”, while the least privileged
elements of Bab-el-Oued or Belcourt bore a marked affinity to the “poor whites”
of Faulkner, coexisting uneasily alongside the blacks in the torrid, over-crowded
American cities of the same epoch. In Algeria, however, there was no form of
segregation so overt as apartheid, or “Jim Crow” laws on buses; on the other
hand, there was nothing resembling the miscegenation of Brazil, or even
Mozambique.
An Arab, but dressed like a person.…
If the pied noir attitude to the indigenous Algerian could be summed up in a
word, it was, simply, indifference. He was regarded, says Pierre Nora, “as an
anonymous figure of whom it sufficed to know that one provided his welfare, so
that one had no need to be concerned about him”. In so far as he supplied the
labour essential for exploiting the country, he was simply “a part of the
patrimoine immobilier [real estate inheritance]”. At best he would be treated
with paternalism, fairness and a kind of formal acceptance of his different
religion and culture. But too often he was regarded with disdain, and from a
vantage of superiority; which manifested itself in many different ways, and more
insidiously among the poorer levels of whites where the frictional contact was
closest. Bicot, melon, figuier, sale raton[2] — there was a plethora of derogatory
slang for an inferior race that sprang all to readily to the lips. Equally a host of
preconceived inherited notions about the Algerian were accepted uncritically,
without examining either their veracity or causation: he was incorrigibly idle and
incompetent; he only understood force; he was an innate criminal, and an
instinctive rapist. Sexually based prejudices and fears ran deep, akin to those
elsewhere of white city-dwellers surrounded by preponderant and ever-growing
Negro populations: “They can see our women, we can’t see theirs”; the Arab had
a plurality of wives, and therefore was possibly more virile (an intolerable
thought to the “Mediterranean-and-a-half”); and with the demographic explosion
spawned by his potency, he was threatening to swamp the European by sheer
weight of numbers.
The pied noir would habitually tutoyer any Muslim — a form of speech
reserved for intimates, domestics or animals — and was outraged were it ever
suggested that this might be a manifestation of racism. Commenting on this,
Pierre Nora (admittedly a Frenchman often unduly harsh in his criticism of the
pieds noirs), adds an illustration of a judge asking in court:
“Are there any other witnesses?”
“Yes, five; two men and three Arabs.”
Or again: “It was an Arab, but dressed like a person.…”
With shame, Jules Roy admitted:
One thing I knew because it was told me so often, was that the Arabs
belonged to a different race, one inferior to my own… “They don’t live the
way we do.…” The sentence drew a chaste veil over their poverty.… Yes,
their happiness was elsewhere, rather, if you please, like the happiness of
cattle… “They don’t have the same needs we do…,” I was always being
told. I was glad to believe it, and from that moment on their condition could
not disturb me. Who suffers seeing oxen sleep on straw or eating grass?
Later on, he confesses: “It came as a great surprise to realise — little by little —
that the figuiers were men like ourselves, that they laughed, that they wept, that
they were capable of such noble sentiments as hatred or love, jealousy, or
gratitude.…”
Even great-hearted Camus, who was among the first to expose the dreadful
economic plight of the Algerians, both shortly before and after the Second World
War, occasionally reveals a curious blindness, almost amounting to indifference,
towards them as human beings. His Oran of La Peste appears to be devoid of
Muslims; although he writes so sensitively (albeit often censoriously) of his
kindred pieds noirs, his vendors selling lemonade for five sous a glass on the
Algiers streets, his Oran shoe-shine boys (“the only men still in love with their
profession”) seem to be accepted as part of the essential, touristique backdrop,
without his pausing to question the penury that must inevitably accompany the
“profession” he believes them to be in love with. Again, in The Outsider he
seems oblivious to the other victim of tragedy, the Arab girl whose lover beats
her up and whose brother is killed while trying to avenge her. It is as if Camus,
too, cannot be bothered to understand this “anonymous figure”, this portion of
the patrimoine immobilier.
Petits blancs and grands colons
But how difficult it is to generalise about a people so diverse as the pieds
noirs! Apart from their mixed racial origins, they represented a wide spectrum of
political hues, and the span between the top and bottom of the economic scale
was even wider. At one end of the political spectrum there were the diehard
conservatives, both rich and poor, some of them later to become known as
“ultras”, who stubbornly resisted all change; at the other end, various kinds of
liberals supporting reform of one sort or another. By the 1950s, these latter were
reckoned to comprise twenty to twenty-five per cent of the overall population,
loosely embracing the European professional classes; these figures also include
the Muslim évolués and a large section of the Jewish community. But the liberals
had little or no proletarian support. Many of the petits blancs were failed farmers
who had gravitated towards the cities, and this in itself was to grant them a
collective political consciousness not to be found among the more rural settlers
of Morocco and Tunisia. Like the poor whites of Rhodesia, they could not afford
to be liberal, but tended to be either Communist or reactionary; and, curiously
enough, these two opposing forces were largely at one, at least where
liberalisation for the Muslims was concerned, as has already been noted at the
time of the Sétif uprising. Between the top and bottom of the economic scale, the
span was even wider. On the whole, earnings were lower than in France; perhaps
as many as eighty per cent of the pieds noirs were merchants or salaried
employees, and among them a father of three might earn less than half that of his
metropolitan opposite number (on the other hand, it would buy benefits
inaccessible to the latter, such as the cheap domestic services of an Algerian
fatma). Yet the prosperity gap between very rich and very poor in France was
less than that between the handful of most affluent grands colons of Algeria and
the petit blanc; while between the latter and his Muslim competitor, the
differential was, in contrast, extremely slender.
Who in fact were the grands colons, the men of power, in Algeria by 1954?
Three names, Borgeaud, Schiaffino, Blachette, were the big entrepreneurs of
Algeria, between them controlling the greater part of the economy, and, pari
passu, wielding immense political power. Top of the list was Henri Borgeaud, a
Swiss by origin (two generations back), a big man in his mid-fifties who looked
like a jolly farmer from the Auvergne and who was proud to proclaim himself a
pioneer of the soil. Centre of the Borgeaud empire was the magnificent mansion
of La Trappe at Staouéli, close to Algiers, which had passed to the Borgeaud
family after its founders, the Trappist monks who gave it its name, were
dispossessed during France’s secular “war” in 1905. La Trappe embraced 1,000
hectares of the best land in Algeria, producing regularly four million litres of
wine per annum. But if wine was the chief source of the Borgeauds’ fortunes, it
was only one of many interests; they were major food producers, and owned
Bastos cigarettes (the Gauloises of Algeria); while the name of Henri Borgeaud
appeared on the boards of, inter alia, the Crédit Foncier d’Algérie et de Tunisie
bank, the granary Moulins du Chélif, the transportation Cargos Algériens, the
Lafarge cement works, the Distillerie d’Algérie, the cork industry, the timber
industry, etc., etc. Hence came the popular saying: “In Algeria, one drinks
Borgeaud, smokes Borgeaud, eats Borgeaud, and banks or borrows Borgeaud.
…” In addition he was senator for Algiers, and had powerful allies in the form of
Comte Alain de Sérigny, the conservative owner of the Écho d’Alger, and, at the
Palais-Bourbon, the deputy Réné Mayer who headed an influential pro-pieds
noirs lobby. The archetype of a paternalist seigneur, he apparently enjoyed the
affection of many of the Muslims among his 6,000 employees, who were
(relatively speaking) both well-paid and well cared-for. But politically Borgeaud
was a deep-dyed conservative. At the Evian peace negotiations in 1962, one of
the F.L.N. leaders, Ben Tobbal, claimed to Favrod, the Swiss journalist: “Henri
Borgeaud deserves the title of national hero. Without him and those like him,
there would never have been a united Algeria.”
Then there was Laurent Schiaffino, who controlled probably the biggest
fortune in Algeria, including most of its shipping. Although a third-generation
Neapolitan, Schiaffino revealed few of the extrovert characteristics one might
have expected; with a greyish complexion, he was a cold and retiring personality
with a meticulous knowledge of the marine world, but seldom seen outside
family or business circles. He too was a senator for Algiers, and owner of the
Dépêche Algérienne, which held a reputation principally for being “anti”, that is
to say, “anti” any measure of liberalisation. (Yet, after 1962, because of the
efficiency and indispensability of his marine fleet, he was the only one of the
grands colons to be invited to stay on by the new Algerian republic.) Third
among the triumvirate of pieds noirs tycoons was Georges Blachette, whose
family, originating from the Midi, were among the earliest pioneers of Algeria. A
small, rotund figure with a delicate stomach and said to live on Evian water,
Blachette was known as the “king of alfalfa”. In the area south of Oran his
alfalfa fields reached the horizon on every side; most of his crop was earmarked
for British paper mills, and it provided the source of no less than twenty per cent
of all Algeria’s foreign earnings. In addition, Blachette had fingers in a number
of other agricultural and industrial pies; he owned the Journal d’Alger, was
elected deputy to the Assembly in 1951, swiftly proved himself a skilled lobbyist
there, and was even considered by Mendès-France for a ministry. In contrast to
Borgeaud and Schiaffino, however, Blachette set out to be a liberal and
progressive. Nevertheless, it could not be overlooked that the Muslim alfalfa
workers were among the most poorly paid in the country.
As a liberal — and a sincere and dedicated one — Blachette’s principal ally
was Jacques Chevallier. In his mid-forties, Chevallier swiftly achieved a kind of
La Guardia reputation as mayor of Algiers, with his slogan of “a roof for
everybody” which he had put into action by the construction of impressive
numbers of low-cost housing units for the city poor. But he was to be constantly
torn in his liberalism between responsibility for the Muslims and for the poorer
pieds noirs. Also a deputy, in 1954 he accepted from Mendès-France the
portfolio of Secretary of State for National Defence declined by Blachette.
Finally there needs to be mentioned, briefly, among the powerful conservative
adversaries of Chevallier and the liberal lobby three other figures: Raymond
Laquière, President of the Algerian Assembly, a shrewd political operator, with
an eroded face, utterly dedicated to European supremacy and going as far as to
aspire to be leader of a separatist Algeria; Amédée Froger, mayor of Boufarik
and president of the Federation of Algerian Mayors; and, finally, Comte Alain de
Sérigny. A tall, nervous, fast-talking aristocrat of roughly the same age as
Chevallier, de Sérigny was deeply proud of his colonial ancestry; he could trace
it back to Le Moyne who had colonised Hudson Bay, and other forefathers who
had fought against the Spaniards in Florida, or struck roots in Louisiana. Brought
up in Algiers, he became a journalist in 1941 only after escaping from a German
prisoner-of-war camp. As the fire-eating editor of the ultra-conservative Écho
d’Alger, founded in 1912, and the most influential pied noir paper, he was to
play an important role.
The Jews
There remains, finally, one other important minority group to be identified —
the Jews of Algeria. Comprising approximately one-fifth of the non-Muslim
population, they — rather like the unhappy Asians of East Africa — tended to
find themselves in the tragic position of being caught between two fires: between
the European and the Muslim world. Many could trace back their antecedents to
the expulsions from sixteenth-century Spain; some even claimed them to predate the invaders who had surged out of the Arabian peninsula during the
eleventh century. Thus they could argue that only relatively were they later
arrivals than the Muslims. However, by 1830 the Algerian Jews had become an
under-privileged community, fallen into backward squalor, and the advent of the
French gave them an opportunity to improve their status. The Crémieux Decrees
of 1870, conferring automatic French citizenship, attracted more prosperous
Jews from outside Algeria; while at the same time they provoked a sense of
unfair prejudice among Muslims. However, it was not the Muslims but the
Catholic Maltese, Spanish and Italian pieds noirs who, at the turn of the century,
launched a minor pogrom against the Jews, smashing up their shops in protest
against the competition of this new class of petits commerçants. (Analysing the
various degrees of disdain in Algeria, a pied noir journalist, Albert-Paul Lentin,
observed how “the Frenchman despises the Spaniard, who despises the Italian,
who despises the Maltese, who despises the Jew; all in turn despising the Arab.”
In the Second World War, Pétain’s anti-Semitic regime repealed the Crémieux
Decrees, and Jewish teachers and children alike were summarily flung out of
European schools; the whole community was menaced with deportation to Nazi
camps.[3] Yet during all this time (so several Algerian Jews averred to the
author), there was barely a breath of anti-Semitism from any Muslim quarter. By
the 1950s the Algerian Jews were tugged in several directions; the least
privileged tended still to identify themselves with the Muslims rather than the
pieds noirs, and many were members of the Communist Party, while the
wealthiest had developed distinctly Parisian orientations. Perhaps typical of the
latter was Marcel Belaiche, who had inherited a large property fortune from his
father; politically, however, he leaned strongly towards the liberal camps of both
Chevallier and Ferhat Abbas, and away from the Borgeauds and Schiaffinos.
After 1954 a significant proportion of the Jewish intellectual and professional
classes was to side with the F.L.N.
[1] Today a commemorative plaque is still kept attentively burnished, the
Algerians counting the overthrow of Vichy by the Anglo-Americans an
important milestone on the road to independence.
[2] Bicot, opprobrium of unknown meaning, or origin; melon, slang for “a
simpleton”; figuier, “fig tree”, because the Algerian peasant allegedly spent his
day sitting under its shade; sale raton, “dirty little rat”; hence, later, the odious
expression ratonnade, rat-hunt, or Arab-killing (not to be confused with
ratissage).
[3] Following the Anglo-American arrival in 1942 the Pétainist measures were
swiftly reversed.