The Atlantic and Its Enemies

weaponry, and had run down the effectiveness both of their army and of their navy. They could not get troops to the Suez area inside a month, and though they did have troops at a base in Libya, they shrank from using these, for fear of offending wider opinion. In fact the Chiefs of Staff objected to an immediate action, threatening resignation: they were just not ready. A British force did eventually leave from Malta and Cyprus — bases both too far distant, given that speed was so essential: the world, confronted by the fact on the ground of an immediate occupation, might have accepted it (as Dulles later said, ‘Had they done it quickly, we’d have accepted it’ and Eisenhower shook his head: ‘I’ve just never seen Great Powers make such a complete mess’). Four days’ delay occurred, while British and American diplomats had a public wrangle. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Mountbatten, showed his usual instinct for the possible, and was only narrowly stopped from resigning as he sensed the unfolding fiasco. The Americans became incensed at being told such obvious lies by men whom they imagined they could absolutely trust, and as the Anglo-French force steamed forth, the American fleet in the area disrupted its radio communications and used submarines to shadow it. Then disaster went ahead. The Canal was blocked by the Egyptians, and oil imports dwindled, prices rising. Junior Foreign Office people threatened mass resignation. The Americans at the United Nations denounced the expedition, and that body produced a resolution in which all countries but a faithful few condemned the British and French: Eden even received a letter from Moscow on 5 November, vaguely threatening retaliation, just as the paratroops at last landed. That was bluster, but a further move was not bluster. The pound sterling was an artificially strong currency, and now the Americans refused to support the pound. It fell — reserves dropping by $50m in the first two days of November, and by 5 per cent of the total in the first week. At that rate, there would be none left by the early weeks of 1957. The end was humiliating, as the American Secretary of State told the United Nations that he could not support his allies. Just as he said so, the landings at Port Said finally occurred on 5 November, but by then it was far too late, and a ceasefire had to follow by the evening of the next day. The broken Eden retired ill to the house on Jamaica where Ian Fleming wrote his James Bond books — one imperial fantasy meeting another. The conclusion at once drawn in London was that never again would the Atlantic link be risked.

The conclusions drawn in France were rather different. She had entered upon Suez because she blamed Nasser for problems in North Africa: he supported, and inspired, an Arab nationalism there, and especially in Algeria. French governments after the war faced colonial troubles. Burke had remarked that political life was a partnership of the dead, the living and the yet unborn, but in France the dead predominated. The theory — very theoretical — behind French republicanism had been that, regardless of origin, all citizens of the republic were French. This was very far from being senseless, and even went back to the Revolution itself, when Robespierre had declared that the colonies might perish, provided that justice survived. The rising socialist Francois Mitterrand himself talked of a France ‘from Flanders to the Congo’, and representatives of the overseas departments or colonies sat as of right in the chamber, sometimes attaining cabinet rank. Determined, after the terrible experience of German occupation and liberation by the Americans and the British, to reassert France’s status in the world, post-war governments let themselves be dragged into a hopeless struggle to retain Vietnam. That ended with the defeat of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, after which a (brief) sensibly run government, under the Radical Pierre Mendes France, gave up. But far worse was to come in Algeria. North Africa had been taken over by the French at various stages. Tunisia and Morocco were taken over in 1881 and 1912 as protectorates, their native rulers kept intact, though controlled by the French. They were not colonies in the strict sense, nor were there many French colonists. For France to give independence in return for useful economic and cultural links was therefore not very difficult, and in 1956 this duly happened. Algeria was different. French rule went back to 1830, and the country at that time had been both vast and empty. It was also quite varied in composition, and the French could divide and rule easily enough. They developed the country, and by 1950 there were a million colonists, known as pieds noirs, apparently because their feet, after trampling the grapes for the wine harvest, turned black. Many of these pieds noirs were not French at all but came from all over the Mediterranean coasts and islands. There was much Arab immigration as well, and as medical improvements got under way, that part of the population greatly expanded (as it has continued to do). In republican ideology, Algerians were French citizens, but on the ground matters were very different: the natives — by origin in many cases no more native than the pieds noirs — had far less political weight, and in the 1930s French governments were dilatory about reform. In effect they were captured by the pieds noirs, and very few of these were prepared to concede anything to the Algerians. As often happens in such situations, from the United States through Ottoman Greece and British India, the opponents of change did have some right on their side: once the empire went, the way would be open to slavery, or ethnic cleansing, or absurd religious divisions. In any case, almost all Frenchmen were convinced that they were carrying out a civilizing mission in Algeria, and even the Communists supported Algerie francaise, though of course expecting that differences between Moslems and others would be vastly reduced in scale once the revolution applied, as in the Soviet Union, its solutions to the national question. Governments in Paris were overthrown just for suggesting reform, which came tardily. Riots and repression followed and educated Algerians, rebuffed, looked to Arab nationalism, to the example of Egypt, where Nasser had established himself at Anglo-French expense in 1952.

In any case, the collapse of the French position in Indo-China showed what might happen: Dien Bien Phu was rapidly followed by a revolt in Algeria, which started with a characteristic atrocity on All Saints’ Day. On 1 November, La Voix des Arabes from Cairo announced, ‘Today, on the fifth day of the month of Rabii of the year 1374… at one o’clock in the morning, Algeria has begun to live an honourable life… A powerful group of free children of Algeria has started the insurrection of freedom against the tyrannical French imperialism in North Africa.’ What had happened was that, in a remote part of the country, a bus had been ambushed, a protesting village headman machine-gunned, a French schoolteacher shot dead and his wife badly wounded. The ambushers waited around for a while, in order to shoot any rescuers who arrived, but since none did, they left. The French followed this with severe repression, harassed relatively moderate Algerians, dropped bombs, and sent in troops who were only too anxious to avenge the defeat in Vietnam (where the French lost some 90,000 men). Mendes France had been sensible over Vietnam but even he reacted, in the first instance, with an ‘Ici c’est la France.’ But it was not so simple. Now, the ‘National Liberation Front’ was in a much stronger position than had been Algerian rebels in the old days, when Foreign Legionaries could romantically hold desert forts against camel-riding raiders. Several of the rebels had fought in the French army; arms could be supplied across the Tunisian border, or even as it turned out from Yugoslavia, where Tito was in full leader-of-unaligned mode; Nasser was bidding for leadership of the Arab world; and the Americans especially were not in sympathy with French colonization (on a later occasion, the American cultural centre in Algiers was burned down by enraged pieds noirs). Algiers itself was the scene of a foul battle in 1957, when random terrorists provoked retribution, and the French parachutists, under an implacable general, Jacques Emile Massu, restored order. One method was torture. By 1958 the army had in its way won, but the cost was enormous — in fact, a degree of hatred between the two sides (and among the Algerians themselves) that made a solution impossible. The pieds noirs were possessed of a collective rage, and so was much of the army. Meanwhile in Paris the politicians, facing condemnation even from allies, were facing the headache of paying for the unending war, and some of them knew that in an era of decolonization there were other ways of saving France’s position in Algeria. Oil had been discovered in the Sahara and that could be obtained easily enough through collaboration with an independent Algeria. In mid-April one government fell and a moderate, Pierre Pflimlin, took the succession. At the very hint of compromise, Algiers exploded. On 13 May the pieds noirs, who all along felt that metropolitan governments were not nearly harsh enough against the rebels, struck; the governor-general’s palace was stormed and sacked; parts of the army clearly sympathized; even, Massu was asked to set up a ‘Committee of Public Safety’, an emergency institution that went back to the days of the great Revolution when France had been invaded. A few days later, a parachute unit from Algeria seized the island of Corsica. There was strong pressure in Paris for a return of de Gaulle, the supreme national figure, and the Algerian French supposed that he would impose an Algerie francaise. There were enormous demonstrations in Algiers (in which a great number of Moslems joined: as ever, in such situations, the Algerian revolt was itself a civil war, and even more Moslems were killed by Moslems than by the French, whose own losses — 30,000 — were surprisingly limited for an eight-year war of this savagery).

The crisis in Algeria and the threat of an army putsch against the government itself at least put an end to the preposterous government crisis. De Gaulle had been thinking. The almost universal belief was that the colonial crises were causing the paralysis of the State. De Gaulle came to the belief that this order should be reversed —