A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 Read Online Free PDF

ahead—it affords me great satisfaction humbly to offer this book up once again.
    The preface to the first edition of A Savage War of Peace included an accounting of kind friends, associates and agencies to whom I expressed warm appreciation. As many have since passed on, as have twenty-nine years, I hope my grateful thanks of yesteryear may remain on the record and that I may gratefully add three new names to the list: those of Dr. Eugene Rogan and Michael Willis Ph.D., of the Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and Edwin Frank, of New York Review Books, for their most helpful editorial inputs. One particular debt, I feel, needs to be reiterated, however. The very genesis of writing A Savage War was proposed to me by my then publisher, and former Prime Minister, the late Harold Macmillan. To him Algeria—with its lasting impact on de Gaulle—had held his imagination ever since World War II, and, though already in his eighties, he was to give me invaluable counsel and constant encouragement, actually reading the manuscript himself three times.
    [ 1 ] There is a certain parallel with the French campaign of 1940. Lasting a matter of weeks instead of seven and a half years, it granted few war diarists (especially on the French side) any opportunity to keep up their diaries or even scribble a letter home; as I discovered when researching To Lose a Battle .
     

PART ONE
     
Prelude: 1830–1954
     
Qu’importe si cent mille coups de fusil partent en Afrique! L’Europe ne les entend pas.
Louis-Philippe, 1835

CHAPTER ONE
“A Town of no Great Interest”
     
As long as you keep Algiers, you will be constantly at war with Africa; sometimes this war will seem to end; but these people will not hate you any the less; it will be a half-extinguished fire that will smoulder under the ash and which, at the first opportunity, will burst into a vast conflagration.
Baron Lacuée, 1831
    Sétif, 1945
    The market town of Sétif sits haphazardly on a high and treeless plain some eighty miles west of Constantine. Even in early summer a thin, mean wind whirls up the dust along its rectilinear streets of typical French colonial design. Passing rapidly through it in March 1943, Churchill’s Minister Resident in North Africa, Harold Macmillan, noted with the eye of a classical scholar that, in comparison with the nearby ruins of Trajan’s Djemila, Sétif was “a town of no great interest”.
    On the morning of 8 May 1945, the inhabitants of this largely Muslim town were preparing for a mass march. It was V.E. Day; for Europe, the first day of peace following the Nazi capitulation the previous night.
    All across the mother country, metropolitan France, there would be fervent celebrations to mark the end of the nightmare five years of defeat, occupation and the destructive course of liberation by her own allies. But compared with the frenzied joy of Armistice Day 1918, France’s jubilation was somewhat muted by the sober backdrop. The scattering of antique cars that crepitated along the grands boulevards of Paris, propelled by cylinders of floppy bags of coal gas, perched on the roof like great duvets, symbolised the state of France herself. Plundered by the occupiers, bombed by the liberators, deprived of fuel and every raw material and fed by a crippled railway system, industry faced a grim struggle for rehabilitation. The épiceries were empty — and already there were grave menaces of industrial unrest. French society was riven; the hunting down of those who had collaborated (or were said to have collaborated) went on apace; politicians were already rending one another, as in the bad old days of the Third Republic, while an aggressive Stalinist Communist Party seemed poised for takeover. Such was the scene that confronted a generation of prematurely fatigued Frenchmen: those who had fought all the way from Lake Chad with Leclerc, or had more recently come limping home from deportation and the prisoner-of-war camps of