“I do not have a particular taste for renouncement and dishonour”

P.49-Chapter X

From the Bazooka to the Betrayal

In fact, what has been called “ The time of the Plots” had started by a bloody and deafening kick off on 16^th January 1957. On this day at around 1900hrs, a bazooka rocket destroys the offices of the commanding officer, Isly street in Algiers. General SALAN, five stars – army general- new high commander of all armed forces in Algeria and the obvious target of this assassination attempt, has just left his office, but an officer assistant, commandant RODIER, is killed on the spot. For this attempt, the executors were known very quickly, and there was no problem to guess who the instigators were; still it is impossible to show some of the responsibilities however known by the specialists. Let’s content ourselves by what general SALAN himself would write about it, fifteen years later, in his memoirs:

“ A two meters misunderstanding”

“ The bazooka plot had for origin a political group, behind which one could see the high and enigmatic figure of general DE GAULLE, and was gravitating around Michel DEBRE and his friends”. Then a Gaullist senator, M. DEBRE was in metropolitan France the most vehement cantor of French Algeria, justifying in advance in his paper “Le Courrier de la Colere” ( The Anger Courier), the eventual recourse to armed insurrection in the case where the Algerian departments were threaten of abandon. But, in the eyes of the one who would, subsequently, blindly follow until the end the policy to give Algeria to the FLN leads by his guru, general DE GAULLE, the LACOSTE plan seemed, at the time, a carrier for the germ of abandon. This opinion was also shared by a great part of French Algerians. Rarely period was so heavy in misunderstandings, and of particularly costly ones. One of these misunderstandings was about the personality of general SALAN. In our unlucky country where, especially among politicians, gossip is taken very often as information, the whispered reputations have more say than the facts. The mouth-to-ear judiciously talked over by the Gaullists, was making out of Raoul SALAN, despite of having one of the most glorious military past, a ‘republican’ general, left leaning, tied to the Free Masons, smoking opium some times, were saying’ well informed people’ and so having all the making of a sell out man.

The CAPTAINS’ HONOUR

It is useless to insist over the incredible injustice done towards the one who, in the darkest hour, would fight to the end, and to whom the newspaper “Le Monde” will be obligated, at his trial, to render homage to his “Roman conception of the French Empire”.

With the SALAN case we approach an essential truth of the Algerian war. It was one of the rarest conflicts of our history where the military was constantly more cleaver than the civilians. More cleaver and mostly more humans. There has been, for sure, a proportion of imbeciles, melodramatic and timid bureaucrats, but in the field will emerge a race of officers, NCOs and even simple soldiers who had transformed this combat as their own affair. The fact that numerous captains, lieutenants, NCOs had lived the “twisted war” and the immense grief for the love of Indochina, was one of the most important element in that appropriation of the war and pacification of the country by the military, who had been forced to enter into the political game.

But a politic that was, already, not the one of the politicians, but more and more the one for Algeria, their Algeria. If, really, “to try to understand is to begin to disobey” then a good third of the French army was in a state of disobedience from end 1956 to 1961. This state of mind took into account the defeat of the FLN in the field and, because of the cancellation of this defeat by to politicians, of the role in the OAS of some of the best officers of the French army. But, in Paris as well as in Algiers, the politicians as we just saw would not change. For some of them, Algeria was an occasion no to be missed: to take the power from of the Fourth Republic, which still had its merits – notably the reconstruction and rebuilding of France – but undermined by governmental crisis, incapable to follow a good policy and deprived of popular trust, was at the end of its life.

This occasion occurred on 13^th May 1958, following the protest of the population of Algiers, made indignant by the execution of three French soldiers by the FLN. The crowd took over the General Government. The army, reluctant at first, shows its kindness, then accomplice. A Committee of Public Salvation presided by general MASSU, is installed. In Paris, where serious and not so serious plots appear, the Fourth Republic doesn’t make a big effort to defend herself. In Algiers, on 15^th May, general SALAN call on general DE GAULLE, strongly suggested to him. Victory! It will be DE GAULLE. At the end of the month, the president of the Republic Rene COTY decides to call DE GAULLE. On 1^st June the National Assembly ratifies by 329 YES against 224 NO his nomination as head of government, with special powers for the reform of the state. In Algeria, however, it is real happiness. With the civilians, the military and the majority of the Moslems. In the great feasts of fraternisation, all find themselves united around the same theme: Integration. All but not DE GAULLE. Of course, he doesn’t say so yet. During his trip in Algeria, early June 58, in front of huge crowd which cheer him, he even state the opposite. He even let himself being taken over by sibylline and grotesque remarks which are his trade mark: ” I understand what you want”- “ I see what you wanted to do here”- “ and even “Long Live French Algeria” doubtless in a moment of weakness. As we cannot envisage that it was emotion, it must have been the heat. As every body had believed in the 13^th May, but not him.

J.B.