The FLN’s internal leadership in Algeria fled to Tunis, where the ‘externals’ blamed them for a failed general strike, for a failed urban terrorist campaign, and for handing the French a major propaganda coup which they were calling the FLN’s Dien Bien Phu. Worse, the French were now decimating the FLN out in the countryside, while installing high-voltage fencing and minefields, with troops stationed at one-mile intervals, to prevent the FLN from raiding from Morocco or Tunisia.
The 584th Infantry Battalion was stationed in the southern Sahara around Tizi-Ouzou, Oued Chair and Ain Rich. Until major Jean Pouget took command, it was an indisciplined rabble whose soldiers had vandalised the train taking them to Marseilles for transhipment to Algeria. Pouget, a wartime resister who had narrowly avoided execution by the Nazis, and had then spent five years in a Viet Minh prison camp after Dien Bien Phu, resolved to clean them up. Thefts and vandalism were punished by making the entire battalion sleep outside in night-time temperatures of -5 degrees Centigrade. Having been tortured himself, Pouget forbade abusive treatment of FLN captives. When he encountered a captive whom a conscript had assaulted, the major punched the conscript twice in the face: ‘That is on behalf of the prisoner … do not forget that a prisoner is a disarmed soldier. He is no longer an enemy and could be a friend of tomorrow. So long as I am in command of this battalion the prisoners will be treated as if they are already our comrades. Now untie him! Medic, check out his wounds.’ Routinely, FLN prisoners were so overcome by such treatment that they gushed out information that was not even solicited. Nor would Pouget tolerate any abuse of the local civilians, imprisoning a lieutenant who had put his arm round the waist of a dignitary’s daughter and then ordering him to sweep the base courtyard. He also whole-heartedly believed in Specialist Administrative Sections. These were hearts-and-minds outposts staffed by young Arabic-speaking officers, who gleaned intelligence while improving local animal husbandry, education, irrigation and medical provision. They went from village to village, listening rather than talking to the inhabitants. If they had problems with their sheep, then the SAS officer would open a disinfection station with no questions asked. They also used mobile medical clinics and cinemas to win over the locals. They sent out doctors under the protection of the village elders, a way of breaking the vice-like grip of the FLN on the population. A twenty-one-year-old philosophy student conscript volunteered to run a village school in a remote location. He was popular. When the FLN killed him, Pouget took no retaliatory action, waiting for the village elders to ask for French protection. Through such calculations, counter-insurgency wars are sometimes won.38
The FLN were also faced with the prospective nightmare of an ethnic split between Arabs and Berbers when an Arab FLN commander shot dead his Berber political commissar who he imagined was abusing local Arab women. He then took his men over as Harkis or Muslim irregulars, who quickly outnumbered the Algerian Muslims fighting for the FLN. French intelligence also successfully inserted high-level agents into the FLN, sowing fear and murderous paranoia in its ranks. In view of these setbacks it is not surprising that there were bitter recriminations and power struggles within the FLN leadership, notoriously involving the luring to Morocco in December 1957 of its most charismatic leader, Ramdane Abane, where he was strangled on the orders of the five Wilaya colonels who increasingly dominated the FLN. A communiqué announced that he had been killed by the French while on a secret mission in Algeria. As the external FLN forces became more professionalised and played an increasingly important part in the fighting, leadership passed to such figures as Colonel Houari Boumedienne, the grimly taciturn figure who would become Algeria’s second president.
That the FLN recovered from apparent defeat was paradoxically due to tensions among the French victors. Success in the battle of Algiers went to the heads of many regular army officers who, already explicitly sympathetic to the colon minority, grew impatient with the succession of indecisive politicians who determined their destinies from Paris. On 8 February 1958 they caused a major international incident when, responding to FLN anti-aircraft fire from within neighbouring Tunisia, they despatched bombers which levelled the town of Sakiet, killing eighty people. This attack was never authorised by the French government and provoked international outrage. Moreover, since the disaster at Palestro, the French public was beginning to question the cost, human, moral and material, of underwriting the pied noir presence in Algeria. It was one thing for regular troops, Foreign Legionnaires and Harkis to die in a war in Algeria’s scrubland, but they felt differently when conscription meant that it involved sons of metropolitan families. Discontent spread to the army as conscript soldiers were used to control areas of scrub and sand while the paras got the glamour, girls and glory in the cities. The conduct of the war, and in particular the systematic use of torture, also discredited France in the eyes of the world, even though the FLN’s own terror tactics included disembowelling people and braining small children against walls. Clumsy attempts by the French government to censor accounts of torture were counter-productive since they could not control the international press, and the use of torture against European supporters of the FLN was a public relations catastrophe.
In May 1958, the colons launched a direct challenge to the French government when they forced Lacoste to leave his post – over government failure to stop the FLN from carrying out reprisal executions -and proclaimed a reluctant general Massu president of a Committee of Public Safety. In the background Salan threatened to extend this coup to France, bringing paratroopers as close as Corsica during Operation Resurrection designed to lever general Charles de Gaulle into power. As Parisians scanned the skies for massed mushrooming parachutes, the aged president René Coty summoned de Gaulle, granting him the right to rule for six months by decree and to draw up a constitution for a Fifth Republic. Playing his cards very close to his chest, de Gaulle had a vision of France that ranged high above the squalid little war in Algeria, to a world in which economic might and nuclear bombs were a surer index of global great-power status than a string of colonies undergoing rancid disputes between colonial dinosaurs and national liberation movements.
De Gaulle flew to Algeria in early June 1958, where he praised the army, claimed he ‘had understood’ the mutinous colons, and slightly opened a door to those ‘Muslim Frenchmen’ whom the FLN had temporarily led astray through the offer of a settlement that would acknowledge the honour of France’s opponents. His Constantine Plan that autumn promised universal suffrage, a single electoral college, and two-thirds Algerian Muslim representation in the metropolitan parliament. Integration was to be accelerated through crash economic and educational reforms. The new constitution became a trial of strength with the FLN. It lost in the sense that nearly 80 per cent of Muslims turned out to vote, and 96.6 per cent voted to approve the constitution of the Fifth Republic. The FLN responded by announcing a provisional government to be based at Tunis, with the erstwhile moderate Ferhat Abbas as president and the imprisoned Ben Bella as his deputy. This entity rejected the Constantine Plan and de Gaulle’s offer of an honourable paix des braves. Worse, in November, the FLN succeeded in deterring anyone of note from standing for election to the electoral college, thereby underlining the fact that the French would have to talk to its representatives. Paradoxically, de Gaulle had more success in reining in the army – general Salan was replaced by Maurice Challe -which then virtually crushed the FLN in three of the Wilayas. That displaced the centre of FLN military activity to Morocco and Tunisia, where quasi-regular forces could be carefully trained and equipped with the increasing flow of Chinese and Soviet-bloc weaponry.
In September 1959 de Gaulle gave radio and television addresses which made the first calculated play with the term ‘auto-determination’. A referendum on this would come about if peace could be established and maintained for four years. The FLN rejected these proposals, which were designed to reach over its head, even as the first crack in the French façade boosted nationalist morale. By contrast the more militant settlers, sensing betrayal, launched a week-long uprising in January 1960 which was viewed