ABSTRACT
It must be said that joy is out of place: for seven years, France has been a mad dog dragging a saucepan tied to its tail, every day becoming a little more terrified at its own din. Today, no one is unaware that we have ruined, starved and massacred a nation of poor people to bring them to their knees. They remained standing. But at what a price! While the delegations were putting an end to the business, 2,400,000 Algerians remained in the slow death camps; we have killed more than a million of them. The land lies abandoned, the douars have been obliterated by bombing, the livestock – the peasants’ meagre wealth – has disappeared. After seven years, Algeria must start from scratch: first of all win the peace, then hang on with the greatest of difficulty to the poverty we have created: that will be our parting gift. We are no longer ignorant of anything, we know what we have done: in 1945, Parisians shouted for joy because they had been delivered from their suffering; today they have this taciturn relief because they are being freed of their crimes. No, not freed of their crimes – we know full well that the crimes we have committed will not fade so quickly – but of the obligation to commit any more. It was time, high time: for us too; you can be sure that our livestock has not diminished, and the standard of living has risen slightly. But in order to avoid the famous selling-off of our Empire, we have sold off France: in order to forge arms, we have cast our institutions into the fire; our freedoms and our guarantees, Democracy and Justice, everything has burnt; nothing remains. Simply ending the fighting is not enough to reclaim our wasted wealth: we too, I am afraid, in a different area, will have to start from scratch. But the Algerians
have retained their revolutionary strength. Where is ours? The announcement of the ‘cease-fire’ has impinged on minds no more and no less than
a news report ‘from abroad’: Khrushchev is to meet Kennedy, agreement over Berlin is to be reached, atomic tests are suspended. France was delirious when Glenn made his orbits round the earth. It was our victory, apparently. People applauded in the cinemas. But this fragile armistice is not our victory. Because the French people were not able to impose it. In 1955, the electorate voted for peace; the elected representatives intensified the war and we said nothing; barracks rebelled, the soldiers did not want to kill. Or be killed. We said nothing: their resistance was crushed. Without saying anything, we allowed the democratic regime to dishonour itself under pressure from the Army. And when the military replaced it by a regime of personal power, we persisted in our silence. Today, a coup d’état government is forced to give us what we timidly asked for seven years ago and we are silent: that goes without saying, since it is not our business. Only one person in France will benefit from the cease-fire: de Gaulle. Yet one only has to re-read his speeches to measure the distance covered from Mostaganem to the Evian negotiations. He did everything, short of moving the desert sands, to discover his Third Force and it is not his fault if the Muslim bourgeoisie, his heart’s choice, does not exist in Algeria. Everything was decided, and his policies overturned, when the Muslim towns opened up and we saw unarmed crowds advancing with a flag at their head towards our soldiers. The truth is that this ‘cease-fire’, which we are quick to declare to be without ‘victor or vanquished’, was imposed by the Algerian people. Alone, by their extraordinary resistance and their discipline. And it is for precisely that reason that this ‘compromise’ has become an Algerian victory. Yet, as events have proved, we French were behind those men who struggled against colonialism. Colonialism over there, fascism here: one and the same thing. And the OAS cannot hope to make North Africa a colony again unless it starts by colonizing France. Same enemies, same interests, the necessity to cooperate on equal terms: what more do you need? If we had shaken off our lazy timidity, if the left had overcome its divisions … The left, it is true, always disunited, more noisy than convinced, is crying victory from its every mouth: it is an appalling cacophony. In vain: the Algerians have been demanding independence since 1954; which of all these rival parties, before 1960, adopted this demand itself? Which of them sincerely tried to make it the profound demand of all French people? Some demanded ‘the right to independence’ – they added with a wink: ‘The right to divorce does not mean you force couples to separate’. And the others, their backs to the wall: ‘I go further than independence’. The result is the ‘cease-fire’ – our defeat. And we are not defeated because we have at last acknowledged the right of a people to self-determination, but, quite the contrary, because we witnessed the most glorious, the most sombre of adventures without ever attempting to take part in it. So many lives would have been saved if the French masses had shown their strength. No, our defeat is not independence, it is the million Algerians whom we allowed to be killed. Wavering, then uncertain, then resigned, we gave our powers to a dictator so that he could decide without consulting us the best way of ending the affair: genocide, regrouping and partition, integration, independence, we washed our hands of it all, that was his business. The result surpasses our hopes: the Algerians have won their freedom, the French have lost theirs. For the former, everything is to be done: it was not without fear that they signed the agreement
protocol; they know that the cease-fire is a revolutionary departure, the beginning of the beginning. For us, it is the final stage: good riddance; and we repeat: ‘It’s over’ with secret relief.
