ABSTRACT
In 1952, one year after her meeting with Nguyen Thi in Berlin, Riffaud was sent to Algeria as apprentice journalist for the trade union paper La Vie Ouvrière. The Algerian troubles – as they were first called by French politicians – would escalate into the most bitterly contested chapter in the history of colonial France. When France withdrew from Vietnam in 1954, she reluctantly ceded rights to her former colony’s raw materials and cheap labour. But when Algerian nationalists sought independence from France later that same year, a lot more than economic advantages and national prestige were at stake. Algeria was not ‘just’ a colony. In the words of François Mitterrand, Interior Minister in the cabinet of Pierre Mendès France, it was France, her districts (‘departements’) extensions of those of the French Republic, her laws, French laws, and her rights and governing authority French.2 The very desire for independence on the part of colonised Algerians was an affront. Because their rebellion was violent, it would be quashed and corrected with force. The authorising of the use of martial law in Algeria by a man who later became the first Socialist President of France’s Fifth Republic3 showed
that in this matter, left-wing and right-wing were, for a time, in agreement about the meaning of the core republican value of ‘equality’. It had to be on French terms.
