John F. V. Keiger

France and the Algerian War: strategy, operations and diplomacy

Frances war in Algeria from 1954–62 has prompted new historical research and political polemics since 1992. Especially controversial has been an acknowledgement that torture was practised systematically, and the fact that French governments refused until 1999 to admit that Algeria was a real war, not just ‘a law and order problem’. Access to French archives, along with publication of memoirs and collections of letters by conscript troops, has permitted fresh social, cultural and literary perspectives, and new insights about the memory of this war in France and Algeria. The wars strategies and military operations, however, have been neglected. Yet these aspects illuminate the nature of the armed challenges by nationalist insurgents in the era of Cold War and European decolonizations. Algeria reveals the operational success of the responses by the French military forces and psychological warfare service. The wars international diplomacy suggests that another ‘operational theatre’ – that of the United Nations and world opinion – was where the Algerian National Liberation Front really outmanoeuvred France. This ensured that French Algerias days were numbered by 1960, despite French success in defeating the armed insurrection within Algeria.

The Algerian War and the French Army, 1954–62

The Algerian War 1954-62 was one of the most prolonged and violent examples of decolonization. At times horribly savage, it was an undeclared war in the sense that no formal declaration of hostilities was ever made. Bringing to an end one hundred and thirty two years of French rule, the Algerian struggle caused the fall of six French prime ministers, the collapse of the Fourth Republic and expulsion of one million French settlers. This volume, bringing together leading experts in the field, focuses on one of the key actors in the drama - the French army. They show that the Algerian War was just as much about conflicts of ideas, beliefs and loyalties as it was about simple military operations. In this way, the collection goes beyond polemic and recrimination to explore the many and varied nuances of what was one of the historically most important of the grand style colonial wars.

Enforcing arms limits: Germany post 1919; Iraq post 1991 introduction

How wars originate, break out and are waged are extraordinarily wellresearched fields. In contrast, as Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George observed almost a quarter-century ago, ‘students of military strategy have not given much systematic attention to the problem of terminating wars, and military planners have also traditionally neglected this problem, concentrating upon how to start wars and fight them successfully’. This statement retains its force: how wars are settled, and how the succeeding international systems bedded in, continues to be a comparatively neglected field of study. Peace treaties and their (in)capacity to establish legitimate and consensual post-war orders have been recently receiving some much overdue scholarly

The ‘War without a Name’, the French Army and the Algerians: Recovering Experiences, Images and Testimonies

Jules Roy, pied-noir writer and veteran of the Second World War and Indochina, could have been speaking of Algeria when he claimed that: ‘It was hardly worth going to war against the Nazis only to become the Nazis of Indochina.’2 They had the taste for liberty, the sense of justice and the instinct for generosity. They wanted to create a multiracial, free, fraternal and prosperous society, to set an example for a world divided between rich and poor peoples. One word symbolised their ambition: ‘integration’! Opposite under the striking red and green banner of Islam, the enemy preached racial hatred and religious fanaticism, the arbitrary terrorism of a one-party dictatorship… To win the hearts of the population, they turned themselves into medical orderlies, administrators, water irrigation project managers, overseers of the rural economy… To protect them, they also became policemen, judges and executioners.3

The Fischer Controversy, the War Origins Debate and France: A Non-History:

The controversy that followed publication in 1961 of Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht was not restricted to West Germany. Even if the Fischer debate abroad did not acquire the vehemence it took on domestically, intellectually the effect was powerful. This article will demonstrate that France was potentially a most propitious terrain for the Fischer controversy to spread. Yet for a variety of reasons, largely to do with the nature of history practised in France in the 1950s and 1960s, it had remarkably little impact. The reasons for there being little reaction to the Fischer controversy also explain the state of the war origins debate in France 50 years on and why the war’s causes have not been seriously investigated by French historians for several decades.

Jules Cambon and Franco-German Détente, 1907–1914*

Improved Franco-German relations are rarely associated with the years preceding the Great War or with the policies of Raymond Poincare. Yet from 1907 to 1914 a persistent attempt was made to bring about detente between Paris and Berlin, which eventually led to the French president adopting a conciliatory attitude towards Germany, occasionally at the expense of relations with Russia. The instigator of this policy was the French ambassador in Berlin, Jules Cambon. He believed that Franco-German detente could best serve the two axioms of French diplomacy since 1870: continental security and overseas expansion. Cambon considered the growth of German power in Europe and abroad to be both natural and inevitable and that France must come to terms with it. 1 His policy involved ending the intransigence which he saw as having characterized French diplomacy, often with disastrous results, since 1870. He confessed in May 1908 that his ideas were fairly summarized in Clemenceaus remark to him: ‘On dit que vous avez dit que vous ne voulez aller ni a Ems ni a Faschoda.’ 2 These two incidents, the ‘Ems telegram’ and the Fashoda crisis, symbolized for him the recklessness and inflexibility of Frances past diplomacy.

The July Crisis

For French public opinion in 1914 the July crisis, as we know it today, never really existed. Had the average French contemporary been asked what he thought the July crisis was, he would doubtless have replied: the Caillaux trial. Analysis of press coverage of the European diplomatic crisis and Madame Caillaux’s trial shows that certainly until 24 July 1914 the latter totally dominated newspaper columns. Even until three days before France began general mobilisation the trial rivalled the European crisis, if not surpassed it, in importance. On 29 July France’s most respected newspaper renowned for its authoritative coverage of international relations, Le Temps, devoted over twice as much space to the final verdict of acquittal in the trial as to the European crisis. It was no different for newspapers with the widest circulation, such as Le Petit Parisien and L’Echo de Paris.1 The French population as a whole had for a month been virtually unaware of the intense diplomatic wrangling which had taken place since the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. They were now in the last days of July about to go to war and yet virtually oblivious to any danger.

Limiting arms, enforcing limits: International inspections and the challenges of compellance in Germany post-1919,Iraq post-1991

Abstract This article compares efforts to curb German military power after 1919 with attempts to limit that of Iraq after 1991. It argues that incomplete defeat in each case, compounded by disputes among the victors (exploited by the Germans and Iraqis) undermined a long-term maintenance of each settlement. UNSCOMs problems in Iraq in the 1990s replicated much of what had hamstrung the IMCC in Germany in the 1920s. Crucial was the lack of autonomous intelligence and verification capabilities, enabling the targeted regimes to defy inspections, whilst challenging the impartiality and legitimacy of the enforcers. Facing devious and unrepentant adversaries, both inspection regimes survived barely seven years. In both cases a second war would ensue against the non-compliers – Germany in 1939, Iraq in 2003.

Anti-War Activists

Our English friends from Salford and Portsmouth should be congratulated on their decision to meddle in matters of internal conflict in French history, of internal conflict in Algerian history and of conflict between French and Algerians. There are times when it is important for matters to be looked at afresh from a different viewpoint. From my own experience working in universities, I know that a university needs someone to come from outside to offer a dispassionate assessment of the institution so I congratulate the English historians who have facilitated this debate about the Algerian War.

Officer Corps Veterans

As a personal introduction, I would like to tell you that from an elementary stage of my education I was taught that Algeria consisted of three French departements and that these departements formed part of France before the Alpes Maritimes and Savoie regions that had only become part of France in 1860. I had suffered the humiliation of military defeat in 1940 and had spent seven years in Indochina, where I had again suffered the humiliation of French defeat. I had then been in Tunisia when I was again called to leave and arrived in Algeria, an integral part of France.