Professor John Merriman:
Okay, by the way there was
big trouble over the weekend in
a suburb.
Next week, the last day,
I'm going to talk about the
problem, so-called problem of
the suburbs.
There was a big problem the
other night and when a policeman
ran down two kids on a scooter,
a scooter,
and they were both killed
apparently.
And, so, there's a lot of riots
again going on.
So, you can--again you can
follow this, if you know French,
on France 2 or TFN,
or in Libération;
but this will probably be in
the newspapers.
Anyway, so what I want to talk
about today--it's hard to do
both of them in one day,
but let's go--is to complement
your reading on de-colonization,
and talk about Vietnam and
Algeria,
and the subtext,
obviously--it's not text that's
intended in this course,
but is that the Americans never
learned the mistakes from which
the French finally learned.
Next week, or next Wednesday,
I'll talk about Charles de
Gaulle, but mostly about after
he comes to power in 1958.
But he's obviously important in
this.
You know from the beginning
that it's after World War Two
that most of the colonies in the
world became independent,
in a process that took decades,
and of course the 1960s,
particularly the beginning of
the 1960s,
is very, very crucial in the
case of Africa.
And this, despite the
insistence of Winston Churchill,
for one, that the British
Empire would not be dismembered.
In Britain this transition from
colony to independent state
stays often replete and full of
problems,
came without violence,
came generally without
insurrection.
This was not the case with
France nor, as you know,
some of you,
not the case in Portuguese,
for Portuguese colonies as
well.
The Netherlands and Britain
both resisted independence
movements before caving in.
And by 1980,
a year that I can even
remember--that was a pleasure
because I was married that
year--more than half of the 154
members of the United Nations
had been admitted to membership
since 1956.
Now, one obvious point is that
part of the dismantling of
empires, one important theme in
this is that Britain and France
in the post-war period became
less important powers than they
had before;
is that, as you know,
France--and this was essential
in de Gaulle's view of himself
and view of the world--seeks to
retain its role as a great
power,
but the world had basically
been divided up in the Cold War
between the Soviet Union and the
United States,
and both of those powers were
competing aggressively for these
newly independent states in
Africa,
in Asia and indeed in North
Africa as well.
And, so, World War Two
accentuated the independence
movements that developed after
World War One.
The case of Vietnam is of
course just classic in that,
and you had a well-organized
nationalist communist movement
ready to assume the mantle of
the movement for Vietnamese
independence.
And as you'll know,
Woodrow Wilson espoused
nationalism as a way to
determining the existence or the
creation of states.
And, so, Wilson and his
American successors were kind of
caught in a trap because on the
one hand they were saying,
"oh yes, we need to recognize
independence movements and
people that see themselves as a
single nation ought to have the
right to have their own state,"
but then because of the domain
of the Cold War the Americans
often found themselves acting in
ways that they did not match
their rhetoric.
The French left Syria and
Lebanon by agreement made with
the United States and Britain
after the war,
but the problem of Vietnam and
the problem of North Africa,
as you know where the French
had been since 1830,
would be much thornier.
Now, Ho Chi Minh--I can
remember this;
and so it's sort of time warp
for someone like me because I
can remember all the marches,
and was in all the marches
against the war,
back when I was your age,
and the chants of "Ho-Ho-Ho Chi
Minh,
NLF is gonna win."
He'd become president of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam
after the war.
Ho Chi Minh's father was an
official under the French,
under French rule,
and he had resigned from his
position because he had become a
Vietnamese nationalist.
And there were other
nationalists by the way.
One has a tendency to say,
well, the Communist Party
represented Vietnamese
nationalism,
but there were other
nationalists who weren't
communists, but the war--because
the war ends--the way the war
comes out one ends up talking a
lot about communist nationalism.
But he had been working,
a kitchen helper,
on a French passenger liner,
crossing the oceans,
before becoming a communist
activist.
And he founded in 1929 the
Indochinese Communist Party,
which he founded in Hong Kong
in 1929.
In 1930 he unified three groups
of Vietnamese Communists around
his leadership.
He was condemned to death in
absentia by the French
government and he was saved by
the refusal of the British
government in Hong Kong to turn
him over to the French,
because he would've been
executed, without any question.
But he was arrested by the
British in 1931 and he remained
in prison in Hong Kong until
1933.
And during World War Two he led
the Vietminh--viet,
and then m-i-n-h--an
organization of Vietnamese
nationalists,
some of whom,
but as I said before not all of
whom, were communists.
Now, the French attacked the
port of Haiphong--God,
these are names out of my past;
I did not know about Haiphong,
I was a couple of years old
then, not even that,
I guess-- killing 6,000
Vietnamese, and they captured
Hanoi, the Vietnamese
capital--and this is after the
war.
And, so, France restored the
nominal authority of a playboy
emperor, but Ho Chi Minh's
Vietnamese Army held most of the
countryside,
rather like Mao Tse-tung's army
in China, had begun during the
war against Kuomintang to carve
out huge sections of Chinese
territory as well.
And Ho was supported by the
Chinese communists,
and he prophesized,
"you will kill ten of our men
but we will kill one of yours,
and in the end we will end up
by wearing you out."
Now, these were the origins of,
at least in the modern era,
of guerrilla warfare.
A French intellectual who's
still living called Regis Debray
wrote a very important book that
I remember I had to read in the
seminar on revolutionary elites,
with Arthur Mendel at the
University of Michigan,
called Revolution dans la
Revolution,
Revolution in the Revolution,
about guerrilla fighting.
Now, if you go back,
those that go back to before
1871--'70/'71--remember what the
Spanish patriots were able to do
in Spain against Napoleon's
occupying forces,
which was to pick them off one
by one, and the French
retaliated by shooting down
civilians,
as they did in Calabria in the
south of Italy and other places.
But, "you will kill ten of ours
and we will kill one of yours,"
and eventually what happens in
the Vietnam case is that--as in
Algerian the case--is that the
pressure to pull out of the war
becomes so enormous that that
strategy wins,
and that the costs of
continuing to fight,
to battle, to repress,
depending on your view of the
matter,
will affect the home front,
and the home front will demand
the end of the fighting and
indeed of the empire.
Early in 1954 the French Army
suffered a major defeat at the
hands of the Vietnamese at a
place called Dien Bien
Phu--p-h-u at end--which is now
a tourist site,
lots of French go there.
I've never been there.
Just as Vietnam has become the
major sort of tourist center,
and for--oddly,
not oddly enough,
but I suppose it's good in
bringing these things to an
end--for lots of Americans who
fought over there,
and some of whom lost limbs
over there, to go back and to
put at least closure on all of
that.
Pierre Mendès-France,
who was the new socialist
premier, succeeded in taking
France out of the war in
Vietnam;
and as you know he would be
less successful in trying to
convince the French to drink
milk as opposed to wine,
a hopeless task,
and he without question became
the most eminent French
politician not to hold power as
president in France.
The Geneva Convention that
year, France agreed to divide
Vietnam into two states.
North Vietnam became a
communist regime,
led by Ho Chi Minh,
the capital of Hanoi;
and South Vietnam became a
republic run by a succession,
I think it's fair to say,
of pretty corrupt leaders who
carried out U.S.
policy in exchange for a free
hand in all of that.
Now, one thing that was going
on behind all of that is the
dissatisfaction of the army with
what happened in Vietnam.
Now, because the army,
which had emerged from World
War One victorious--but
ultimately France was less
powerful than Germany had been
in defeat;
France in victory was less
powerful--had been defeated and
many officers argued that it was
the collapse of the home front
that had brought this about,
and that they had been
supported actively by--over the
long run;
if enough resources had been
thrown in then victory could be
achieved.
Now, if that doesn't sound like
Vietnam in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, a time that nobody
in this room except two of us
remember,
because that's exactly the same
scenario;
and it's exactly the same
scenario now,
but that's another matter.
And, so, therefore France gets
out of Vietnam,
and one of the things that
happened--by the way,
my friend Mark Lawrence has an
excellent book on this--is that
already the French and the
British in the late 1940s were
getting the Americans to kind of
do what they wanted.
But what happens then is that
when the French are gone,
then the communist insurgency
in the north and the Vietcong in
the south lead to this bloody
series of just horrible years in
which so many Americans and so
many Vietnamese died,
and they are commemorated by
Maya Lin's wall in Washington,
with their names on it.
And you can remember those
scenes of the frantic end when
the helicopters are pulling off
the well-heeled and the
well-connected from Saigon,
in the very end,
and it was a lesson that was
not learned;
and sometimes that's the way
that things go.
But that was nothing compared
to Algeria, that was nothing at
all.
And one of the big differences
why what happened in North
Africa, but above all in
Algeria,
occurred is that Vietnam,
for all of the residuals of
French architecture,
building cathedrals and opera
houses along French
architectural lines--there's a
wonderful book by a woman called
Gwendolyn Wright about imperial
architecture--and there were a
good number of French living in
Vietnam.
But Vietnam was not a
settlement colony the way that,
for example,
Australia and New Zealand had
been in the British Empire.
But Algeria was,
and so was Morocco,
and Tunisia,
were settlement colonies.
All sorts of people lived
there, from France,
and they were called
colons,
or settlers,
basically, and their nicknames
were the pieds-noirs,
the black feet.
And there's several
interpretations-- maybe Brian
can illuminate us--but sometimes
they were called black feet
because of the boots that the
army soldiers wore,
or because it was thought that
if they walked over the burning
sands of the Sahara that their
feet would be burned and
therefore become noir.
But they were settlers,
they were people who had been
there, in many cases,
for generations and
generations.
Now Algeria,
as Charles told you and you
already know,
was first conquered in 1830;
Algiers falls in June,
the end of June or early July,
I can't remember which,
1830, and it's "pacified";
that is, lots of people are
slaughtered over the next
decades.
In 1851, after the insurgency
to defend the democratic and
social republic against--this is
before this course but it's
still important--against the
coup d'état of Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte who became
Napoleon III,
many of the people who were
arrested and put on trial,
court-martialed essentially
before what they called mixed
commissions,
were sent to Algeria,
either as prisoners in Algeria,
or just simply kicked out,
and then in a whole variety of
ways were essentially allowed to
take lands that belonged to the
Arab and Berber populations,
and therefore they are there.
And one of the things about
imperialism is that this sort of
social imperialism,
that Algeria was sort of a
safety valve,
that people who couldn't find
work or couldn't survive often
went to Algeria,
because it was sort of like the
far west, the image of the far
west in the U.S.--there's a
place you can get land,
you can plant vineyards,
you can plant fruit and you'll
have a life;
you could buy a café
and you will have a life.
And, so, it was much easier to
get out of Vietnam because you
didn't have a lot of French
people living in Vietnam,
and many of the people in
Algeria did not want the French
to pull out.
They associated the empire with
their lives.
They were French,
and Algeria as you know from
reading Chip's book,
Sauwerwein's book--who's
retiring,
he's just retiring,
there's a party for him I think
today at the University of
Melbourne--that they were--I
lost my sentence there--but they
were there and their empire was
their lives,
the French Empire was their
lives.
And, so, you've got one million
French, originally French people
living in Algeria;
you have 200,000 in Tunisia;
and you have 300,000 in Morocco.
And, so, they poured money into
their cafés in
Algiers,
in Algiers,
into their farms,
into their economic activities,
and they were there.
Some of them were very wealthy,
big landowners;
they were called the gros
patrons, the big guys sort
of, and they were determined
that France would stay in
Algeria, Algeria was French.
They were opposed by the FLN,
the Front de Libération
Nationale, which was very
similar to the Vietminh in
Vietnam.
And the resistance was also
very, as one would reasonably
expect, with Islam,
with the Muslim world.
Three events in 1956 hardened
the lines between the
colons,
that is the settlers,
and Algerians fighting for
independence.
On February 6th a mob in
Algiers greeted the French
premier, who was called Mollet,
m-o-l-l-e-t,
and his choice for governor
general who was considered by
the colons to be too
pro-Arab,
and they greeted him with
rotten eggs and with tomatoes.
And it's a very nasty scene and
Mollet capitulates and appoints
a socialist,
a more strident on the issue of
holding onto Algeria,
as governor general.
In October 1956 there's a
conference between the Sultan of
Morocco and a leader of the FLN
in Tunisia.
There is outrage in the French
rightwing press.
And, so, French authorities had
the most important delegate at
this meeting,
a guy called Ben Bella who is
still alive--b-e-n,
b-e-l-l-a.
I just looked the other day to
see, and I think he's still
alive;
he was born in something like
1919, if I remember correctly.
They have him kidnapped and put
in a jail near Paris.
They begin to repress critics
of this rather bold and totally
illegal act, and seize books
that are against this movement.
And then in November,
as some of you know,
the French government
participates in the whole Suez
Canal mess,
in part because Egypt--and
we'll see this in a minute,
at least briefly--was an
important part of generating
sympathy for the Algerian
national resistance movements.
And the British and the French
invade, there's a ceasefire
that's forced by Russia,
the Soviet Union,
with the aid of the United
States.
And this seems to be another
humiliation, and what this does
as it begins to harden the
lines.
Now, the problem with all of
this again is the army,
is that now it looks again from
the point of view of the high
command in the army that again
the civilians are going to
capitulate and there'll be some
humiliating withdrawal from
Algeria,
as there had been from Vietnam.
But it's a very different cost,
isn't it, because you've got a
million "Frenchmen,"
in quotes, as they see
themselves--they didn't accept
the Frenchness of the Other,
as they unfortunately saw the
Arab population.
Is the army going to be
disgraced again?
Now, again World War Two and
the defeat in 1940,
and people could remember that,
has to be seen as a background;
and the defeat in Vietnam.
In 1958 the average military
officer had spent at least one
thirty-month tour of duty in
Indochina and the average
military officer had spent two
to four years in Algeria,
along with a small tour of the
occupying garrisons in West
Germany.
But support was wavering for
the war.
Citations for wounded soldiers
stopped appearing in the
official journal,
the Journal Officiel.
20,000 French soldiers had died
in Vietnam--that's a lot;
9,000 had died by 1958 in
Algeria.
And, so, there are charges of
abandonment and hatred of the
officers of the French Communist
Party,
which seemed to be
orchestrating,
among other people
orchestrating it,
along with the intellectuals,
opposition to the war.
And then there was the issue of
torture--how topical again in
the world in which we lived.
The army had revived an old
concept of what they considered
to be the real country,
the true country,
the true France,
if you will,
representing the real interests
of France,
that is the army,
and the legal country,
which included some of those
people who opposed them.
And, so, within the army there
begins to be not only discord
but attempts to organize
rightwing groups--they became
known as the OAS,
the secret army,
that eventually tries to kill
Charles de Gaulle himself,
and launches a campaign of
terror in France,
and things that you can read
about.
They try a putsch in 1961.
Sometimes--I used to show this
film in here,
but the torture scene is too
hard to see and people used to
leave;
it's horrible but it's one of
the great movies made in our
lifetimes, it's The Battle of
Algiers;
The Battle of Algiers,
absolutely fantastic.
The scene where the woman with
a bomb goes into a café
and places the bomb and looks
at families,
who personally she has nothing
against, and she knows that
they're going to blow up and be
killed--it's one of the great
scenes in film.
And you think it's a
documentary but it's not,
and it's about the French war
against the Kasbah,
against the Algerian quarters,
and these two worlds,
the French colon worlds
and the cafés of the
colons--their extension
would be the port of Marseilles,
the old port of Marseilles--and
the world of people in the
Kasbah.
And, so, what the military
wants to do is they want to
break the political military
organization of the insurgents,
and they want to do this
through state terror.
So, you have the terror of
those who are accused of being
terrorists, who are blowing up
cafés,
as the independence movement
did in Vietnam,
and the state terror involving
the systematic torture,
the murder, the slaughter of
very ordinary people,
many of whom had nothing to do
with anything.
And their response is
repression, first;
second--this is from a book by
Chalmer, I think,
I can't remember who lists
these things,
on the army--a totalitarian
technique of organization
promising some reform but
basically just organizing
basically a military state;
the political activism of the
army, thus the OAS,
and working on the French
population as a whole to argue
that those who are against these
measures being taken by the
French Army in the name of
France are disloyal,
and do not represent the true
France, the real France,
as they see it.
And, so, the cycle of violence
is totally untenable.
And the intellectuals get
involved-- Camus,
Albert Camus,
and lots of others organize
opposition to the torture,
to this repression,
to these mass murders,
and the stakes increase
dramatically,
and it is a total chaos.
Camus, who was born in Algeria,
described the difficult choices
for French families who lived in
Algeria--the vast majority were
not in favor of mass murder and
torture.
He said that if he was given
the choice between justice and
his mother he would take his
mother.
But lots of people there were
again these café
owners, were people of modest
of means who were simply caught
in the middle of all of this.
Now, on March 13th,
1958, a protest demonstration
by French settlers,
the colons,
in Algiers, turned into a
military led insurrection
against the French government.
A committee of public safety,
but not a leftwing one but a
rightwing one,
of rightists seized power--this
is in Algeria--and there was a
distinct possibility of a
military coup d'état in
France.
I have a friend called Maurice
Gardin who's been in the
ministry, he's now retired,
but is an academic,
and when he was in the army
back in those days he was in
Dijon,
and they had--or he was in the
air force--and he had--they were
told to park planes on the
runways in Dijon--and this
happened in very many places in
France because it seemed quite
likely that the paras,
that is the French
paratroopers,
were going to be landing and
that there would be civil war in
France between the army and
those army elements that didn't
go along with all of this,
and those intellectuals,
and the communists,
and the socialists,
and all these other people;
though a lot of the socialists
were quite ambivalent about all
this.
Now, Charles de Gaulle,
who had gone off to his small
house in a place called
Colombey-les-Deu
x-Églises,
after he didn't get his way,
as you know,
right after World War Two,
announced that he was ready to
serve France again.
Many politicians who had real
reasons to fear a seizure of
power by the military,
they believed that only the
towering figure of Charles de
Gaulle could save France.
And on May 29th,
1958, President René
Coty, c-o-t-y,
perfume, appointed de Gaulle
premier,
a move approved by the National
Assembly in early June.
He accepted on condition that
he could rule by emergency
decree for six months,
and then asked the nation to
approve a new constitution.
Now, de Gaulle had always
insisted that France needed a
stronger executive authority,
that the Third Republic had
fallen, basically,
because no there weren't any
strong leaders to make what he
considered the right decisions
in the 1930s,
but because of the fear of
Caesarism, of Napoleons,
of Boulanger and of these kind
of strong types,
or of Vichy,
for that matter,
of Pétain,
the President of France had
very little power;
power remained in the Chamber
of Deputies.
Now, the Right,
including the army,
was delighted to have de
Gaulle, the big guy,
serving in what they assumed
would be a more or less
permanent or lengthy capacity
until a new constitution with a
strong executive authority could
be written.
He was one of theirs.
He was wounded on a bridge in
Dinant, not the two French
Dinan, but the Dinant in--with a
t, Belgium, at the very
beginning of World War Two.
He was born,
had been born in the fortress
town of Lille,
not too far away from the big
garrisons and the big fort
there,
and surely de Gaulle would want
Algeria to remain
French--wouldn't he?
Now, the new constitution
increased the authority of the
president.
It was written by Michel
Debré,
by the way, whose son is a very
important Gaullist--well it's
not called Gaullist anymore,
but UMP leader in France now.
What it did is it set the term
of the presidency at seven
years--it's gone back to five
now--and ended the
revolving-door ministries.
And presidents under the Fifth
Republic could now conduct
foreign policy,
they appoint prime ministers
and they can dissolve
parliament.
In September 1958 eighty
percent of the population
approved the constitution of the
Fifth Republic.
But what about Algeria?
Now, the Algerian situation was
different than any other war of
independence that had been
fought before,
and there was an
internationalization of that
war.
There's a brilliant book on
this by a guy called Matthew
Connolly, who teaches at
Columbia,
who was a graduate student
here, and what the National
Liberation Front in Algeria was
able to do was to mobilize
newspapers of the Left and of
the Center,
and to use this sort of
publicity machine to excite
worldwide attention against
torture,
against the abuses of civilians.
There was an
internationalization of that
war, and this goes a long way to
try to help the situation of the
rebels, of the insurgents,
in Algeria.
Now, so, what's he going to do?
So, on the 4th of June,
1958, he goes to Algiers,
and he's welcomed by the
throngs;
not the Algerians but the
colons.
By the way, the
harkis--two names I need
to explain--the harkis
were the Algerians who fought
for the French,
and if they stayed in Algeria
after the war they are toast,
and so they--and then the
French,
what they did is they brought
them back and put them in not
really internment camps,
but sort of;
they put them into areas,
kind of reserved areas for
them, and of course their
relations with other Algerians
are not very good,
and it's a very awkward
situation.
The other name up here is
Massu, who is one of the chief
torturers, who just died a
couple of years ago,
in the army.
So, he goes to Algeria and he
says, he gives this classic
speech of non-committal.
He told the settlers on the 4th
of June, 1958,
"I have understood you,
I know what you have tried to
do here."
But he'd already decided that
the costs of France continuing
the war were too great,
that the war was too decisive,
and he removed many of the
generals responsible for the
coup d'état in Algeria
from their post.
For somebody for whom
nationalism, as we'll see on
Wednesday, underlay his basic
philosophy of life this seemed
to be an astonishing turnaround,
a stab in the back by a
military man.
And as the Dreyfus Affair had
revealed in the 1890s,
and the Vichy years had
confirmed,
a rightwing anti-democratic
tradition survived in the
officer corps,
and so they felt absolutely
betrayed.
And, so, the OAS,
which had already existed,
in reality they tried to kill
de Gaulle.
The closest they get is at a
place called Clamart,
outside of Paris,
where they machinegun his big
limousine,
and there's twenty or thirty
bullet holes in there;
and it's hard to miss a guy
who's sort of power-forward
size, 6'7, a huge,
huge man, but he emerges
unscathed--it was absolutely
incredible.
And they plant bombs in
Paris--this is terrorism--to
blow up and to terrorize the
population.
De Gaulle assumes emergency
powers again,
this time for a year,
but not in the interests of the
army.
His interest is to pull
France--this is the ultimate in
realpolitik--is to pull
France out of Algeria.
And there's a vote for Algerian
independence held in 1961,
in July, and fifteen million
vote oui and five million
vote non.
And there's a new attempt in
Algeria by army officers to
organize an insurrection and is
soon put down,
and Algeria becomes free.
Now, in the last minute that
remains to me,
that I have left,
one of the things that is
interesting now in the last,
well, twenty years,
is that when the National
Front, the rightwing party of
Jean-Marie Le Pen,
who had dismissed,
by the way the death camps and
the Holocaust as a "minor
detail"--I'm quoting him
exactly--and who applauded the
drowning of immigrants in the
Seine River by his thugs,
when he first came to the
attention of the world with a
series of astonishing electoral
victories,
or at least good showings in
various places in France,
one of the things that people
first,
who followed it,
first noted is that he didn't
do that well in the--any more
than anywhere else--in the more
traditionally Catholic parts of
France,
that is Brittany or one of the
departments where he had his
first big success,
near Chartres,
in a place called Dru;
but the places that he did
astoundingly well were on the
Mediterranean and in the
Vaucluse, that is where Avignon
is, and Orange.
Why?
It's not the large immigrant
populations from North Africa
who are voting for somebody that
wants to drown them or send them
back to where they came from--
they're not voting for him.
The people that voted for him
massively are the colons,
the pieds-noirs--not all
of them,
but it was they who had to
leave, in 1960,
and '61, and '62,
in many cases getting out
quick,
packing up photos,
whatever they could take with
them, in some cases,
extreme cases,
and going to France where they
bought cafés,
orange groves,
et cetera.
And they remembered and they
hated.
And that's what changed in a
dramatic way an area that had
always been leftwing,
at least since the middle of
the nineteenth century,
and turns it into the bastion
of,
for awhile, of the National
Front.
And then things got more
complicated, but it went back to
these events in Algeria and what
happened there,
that shaped not only France,
but movements in other
countries.
See you on Wednesday.
 
