At the beginning of July, Fanon’s unit entrained and went east to Algeria, which was the springboard for the landings in southern France. Fanon knew no more about Algeria than he knew about Morocco, and what little he did know derived from what he had learned at school. Algeria became part of the school history syllabus in 1928.75 Every schoolchild knew that France invaded Algeria in 1830 to avenge the insult suffered by the French consul in April 1827, when the Bey of Algiers struck him with a fly whisk. Everyone knew that France wanted to rid the Mediterranean of pirates, that Algiers lived by kidnapping and ransoming foreigners and that those unfortunate enough not to be ransomed became galley slaves. Piracy had certainly been an Algerian industry, but it was also practised throughout the Mediterranean and was by no means a specifically Algerian practice.76 It was also very much in decline by 1830. It was also claimed by French schoolbooks that the Algerian expedition was intended to free Algeria from the Ottoman Turks, who were its nominal rulers. Everyone knew that Algeria had been an integral part of France since 1848, and that France had a civilizing mission there. The reality was much more prosaic. The incident between the Bey and the consul related to unpaid bills for grain supplied to French forces during the Napoleonic era. The imperial gesture of dispatching a fleet to Algiers was an attempt to boost the popularity of a failing regime in Paris. No one was taught at school that most of Algeria’s ten million ‘natives’ were colonial subjects and not citizens with full voting rights, that only a tiny élite belonged to a second ‘junior’ electoral college that returned members to the Assemblée algérienne or that Arabic and the various Berber tongues were officially regarded as ‘foreign languages’. Until 1944, the daily lives of Algeria’s ‘natives’ were governed by the code de l’indigénat, based on a list of thirty-three infractions that were not illegal under French common law but were illegal when committed by Muslims. Defaming the French Republic, travelling without a permit, refusing to fight forest fires and plagues of grasshoppers, begging outside one’s home commune and firing weapons into the air during celebrations were all offences under the code de l’indigénat. Refusing to pay taxes was an offence under both the code and the common law.77 The abolition of the code did not greatly change anyone’s life. There was no reason for Fanon to have known any of this when he first set foot on Algerian soil. Nor was there any reason for him to have known that all attempts to introduce reforms had been frustrated by the representatives of a European population which was ‘French’ only because it had been naturalized from the 1870s onwards.
Under the terms of the 1940 armistice, France retained its sovereignty over Algeria and, although there was initially considerable local enthusiasm for continuing the war, the colony soon rallied to Pétain.78 Most of the pied noir population became enthusiastic supporters of Pétain’s National Revolution, and particularly of its anti-Semitic laws, which deprived the substantial Jewish population of their rights as naturalized French citizens and removed them from public office.79 The Arab-Berber population was divided, with many of the notables being attracted to the paternalism of the new regime, whilst more nationalistic elements were more likely to take a pro-German stance on the traditional grounds that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Still others hoped that an American invasion would free them from French colonialism. The Atlantic Charter signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941 had spoken of the right of all peoples to choose their own form of government and some saw this as a promise of at least self-determination.
In December 1942, Ferhat-Abbas and a delegation of twenty-four Algerian notables drafted a ‘Manifesto of the Algerian People’ and presented it to the French authorities. It called for the condemnation and abolition of colonization, recognition of the right of all peoples to self-determination and the establishment of a constitution for Algeria. The latter should guarantee the absolute freedom and equality of all without distinction as to race or religion, the abolition of feudal property, the recognition of Arabic as an official language, freedom of the press and association, free compulsory education for children of both sexes, freedom of religion and the effective participation of Algerian Muslims in their own government.80 The document’s significance is almost incalculable. It was produced by évolués who were, in French terms, the finest products of the colonial system. These were men who had rejected the populism of most forms of Algerian nationalism, typified by Messali Hadj’s Parti Populaire Algérien, in favour of integration or assimilation into France. Many, like Abbas, one of the rare Algerians to have studied at the University of Algiers where he qualified as a pharmacist, had been members of the ‘Young Algerian’ movement, a classic évolué movement;81 those who had seen their salvation in assimilation were now thinking of independence within the framework of a new commonwealth. Although the Governor General accepted the Manifesto as a basis for further reforms, it was made clear that decolonization was not on the agenda. Reforms were indeed introduced in 1944. The code de l’indigénat was abolished. It could now be claimed that all the inhabitants of the country were subject to the same laws, and that the ‘natives’ administered their own affairs with French assistance and in accordance with their own conceptions and the rules of democracy. Where Europeans were in the majority, the basic administrative unit was the commune de plein exercise, where officials were elected, as in France. Most natives lived in communes mixtes, where French officials were appointed from above and ruled with the help of nominated Muslim judges and bureaucrats known to all as beni-oui-oui, or yes-men. France was a secular republic in which the separation of Church and State was strictly observed; in Algeria, mosques were under the control of the State.
For the first three years of the war, Algiers was a city of plots and conspiracies where factions manoeuvred for power and influence, but one in which the future of Algeria itself was definitely a secondary issue. This was a world in which double and even triple agents fought secret wars of their own. Pétainistes and Gaullistes struggled for power. The Gaullist secret service, officially known as the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, recruited agents with contacts in Algiers’s extensive criminal underworld. Assassinations took place, and the corpses of suspected Vichy agents floated in the Bay of Algiers. The sinister atmosphere of the early 1940s is well captured in Emmanuel Roblès’s novel Les Hauteurs de la ville, which deals with an Arab’s assassination of a French businessman who is recruiting Algerians to work for the Todt organization, which built fortifications in France for the German army.82 In November 1942, Allied troops landed in Algeria and Morocco and effectively made the two countries American protectorates in which the old Vichy supporters remained in power. Although successful in North Africa, Operation Torch was the trigger for a full German occupation of France. It did not free Algeria from French rule.
De Gaulle arrived in Algiers on 30 May 1943,83 and the establishment of the Comité français de libération nationale made Algiers his capital. It also became the logistical base for Operation Anvil (later code-named Dragoon), which was planned for August 1944. It was a controversial operation. Churchill was reluctant to support it and was convinced that the main thrust should be through Italy and then into Austria. In his view, landings in the south of France would merely divert resources away from the main task. De Gaulle’s argument in favour of Anvil was highly politicized. It had long been clear that the landings in Normandy – Operation Overlord – would be mainly an Anglo-American operation and, if the whole of France were liberated by non-French forces, there was a distinct possibility that the country would come under an Allied military government. Anvil was planned as a Franco–American operation designed both to assert de Gaulle’s own authority and to establish French sovereignty. In military terms, landings in the south would provide the anvil on which the hammer blows of Overlord would pound the Germans. After a lot of political manoeuvring, de Gaulle got his way.84
On 14 July 1944, de Gaulle took the salute at the Bastille Day parade, and watched the 5BMA as it marched past him. Fanon’s unit was in fact merely passing through Algiers on its way to a new camp near Orléansville (now known as Chlef) to await embarkation for France. Conditions were little better than they had been in El Hajeb, and the welcome that awaited the Martinicans was not a friendly one. They reached camp at four in the