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I do not bury myself in a narrow particularism. But I do not want to lose myself in a limitless universalism. There are twowaysto lose oneself: through a segregation walled in by particularism or through a dilution in the “universal.”
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE, October 24, 1956
Even before the outbreak of the French-Algerian War on November 1, 1954, many French intellectuals had condemned their government’s attempt to maintain its colonial regime in North Africa and elsewhere. Some, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, went further by urging French workers and colonized peoples to unite as an international force in order to cast off the yoke of bourgeois capitalist oppression.1 Yet at the outset of the war very few French intellectuals (including Sartre) were able to think of Algeria as being completely independent from France. In fact the word independence, according to pied noir writer and journalist Jean Daniel, was heard by many French for the first time when the colonists in Algeria began to use the term in voicing their dissatisfaction with the French metropolitan government.2
If French intellectuals had a difficult time conceiving of full-scale independence, the French government was far more intransigent. The reaction of the minister of the interior, François Mitterrand, to the 1954 uprising of Algerian nationalists was simple: “Algeria is France. And France will recognize no authority in Algeria other than her own.”3 Initially, protests against the government’s position emanated from the left-wing intelligentsia. Three months after the Algerian revolution commenced, French politicians turned to a well-respected liberal intellectual to help bring the situation under control and quiet intellectual protests. When Jacques Soustelle was nominated to the post of governor general of Algeria on January 25, 1955, by Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France, later confirmed by Edgar Faure, few could have predicted that the political appointment would have had such a tremendous influence on the debates over postwar intellectual legitimacy.4
By the end of his term in February 1956, Soustelle had done more than any other intellectual to shape the debates over the proper role of intellectuals during the war; he was the first major voice to challenge the burgeoning, post–1945 notion of intellectual engagement that linked intellectual legitimacy to the anticolonialist movement. Just as antifascism had from before World War II, anticolonialism emerged from the highly politicized battles of independence as the endorsed position of French intellectuals. This endorsement would go mostly unchallenged until the advent of Algeria’s bloody civil war in the 1990s.
The encounter between Soustelle and the anticolonialist intellectuals during the first two years of the French-Algerian War illustrates the degree to which competition for the reconstruction of postwar French intellectual identity was submerged within the debates over Algerian nationalism and French anticolonialism. Soustelle was a first-rate academic anthropologist, and his effort to maintain French sovereignty in Algeria was important to address.5 However, the real provocation in the debates over intellectual legitimacy resulted from Soustelle’s highly publicized appropriation of the title “intellectual” to legitimize his political career.
Intellectually, Soustelle’s credentials were extraordinary. Born a French Huguenot in 1912, Soustelle entered the École Normale Supérieure (ens) in 1928 at the top of his class. By 1932 he had passed his agrégation, graduating with the highest grade in philosophy and breaking the ens record; by 1935 he had reoriented his interest toward ethnology, in which he obtained his doctorate at the Sorbonne. From 1932 to 1935 he traveled on scientific missions to explore the little known regions of Mexico; in 1937 he was named assistant director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Just before the outbreak of World War II, he gave courses on his ethnographic research at the École Coloniale. An expert on Aztec civilization, Soustelle charted the effects of the Spanish conquests on South American Indians and was quite aware of both the positive and negative transformative effects of Western European civilization on non-Western societies.
Soustelle was equally successful as a politician. His early reputation was that of a radical republican and, although he never joined, he was close to the PCF.6 Because he had a reputation as a left-wing antifascist, he seemed a logical choice for the post in Mendès France’s socialist government. Ironically, the right-wing French community in Algeria, which would grow to adore Soustelle, protested vehemently against his appointment because of his earlier radicalism. Aside from his unflinching antifascism, Soustelle had one specific qualification the right-wing colons distrusted: he was an intellectual, an ethnologist.
Soustelle entered Algeria as a reformist. He attempted to win support for France among Algerians by instituting economic and political programs that would clear the path for continued cooperation between French and Algerians. Concentrating on the implementation of the Organic Law of 1947, which recognized Algeria’s civic personality and financial autonomy, he sought Algerians’ eventual political enfranchisement. He called this program “integration”; it would recognize the distinct character of Algeria but keep it French. Soustelle was immediately handicapped, however, by two factors: he had been nominated by Mendès France but put in place by Edgar Faure, who was much more conservative, and he faced open hostility to his political reforms from a French-dominated Algerian Assembly.
Soustelle’s policy of gradual reform met with another monumental obstacle, the escalation of terror and violence, which proved to be the bête noire of his tenure as governor general. The massacres in the beautiful coastal city of Philippeville on August 20, 1955, one of the bloodiest days of the revolution, highlighted the problem violence posed to Soustelle’s reforms. On August 20, the FLN Wilaya Two section of Algeria, led by Youssef Zighout and his second in command, Lakhdar Ben Tobbal, decided to bring the revolution to the civilians. According to John Ruedy, the FLN’s decision to massacre French and Muslims was largely an effort to create mass support for the nationalist movement by creating an atmosphere of deadly intercommunal tension.7 The FLN killed 123 people in and around Philippeville, 71 of them Europeans; among the Muslims were several Algerian politicians.
The French reaction was swift and severe. The day after Philippeville, Soustelle went to inspect the city. He was horrified by the sight of children with slit throats and evidence of other indiscriminate attacks on women and children, and ordered massive reprisals against the “rebels” responsible.8 As a result, the FLN claimed that twelve thousand Muslims were killed.9 Soustelle swiftly labeled the nationalist violence racist and barbaric. November 1 and August 20 fueled Soustelle’s claim that the “aggression was always the action of our adversaries.”10 But who, exactly, were France’s adversaries in Algeria, according to Soustelle?
Before Philippeville, on June 1, 1955, Soustelle had written a nineteenpage quasi-anthropological “confidential” description of the Algerian situation that drew up a typology of the so-called Muslim personality exemplified by six possible groups: (1) pseudo-elected Muslims who were “installed in their chairs due to fraudulent elections”; (2) traditionalists who represented the old Arab families firmly connected to France; (3) Muslims tied to French republicanism and desiring integration into France as soon as possible; (4) “federalists” who, like Ferhat Abbas, wanted an Algerian state tied to France; (5) nationalists like Messali Hadj who were unwilling to allow Algeria to remain French but who were also far from accepting terrorist violence; and (6) the Comité Révolutionnaire d’Unité et d’Action (crua), the real leadership of the FLN, who conceived France as the ultimate enemy and decolonization as a “holy war.”11 For Soustelle the politician, one of the most important aspects of the war was to protect Algerians from the terrorism of those in the sixth category. Yet, important as terrorism was, the real problem lay “elsewhere”: “it consist[ed] in not allowing the masses and the Muslim elites to slide toward dissidence today and tomorrow, in any case, for the short term” (18).12
On November 22, 1955, an administrative circular was written for civil and military authorities titled “The Proper Idea to Have of the Muslims in the Struggle Against Terrorism.” Soustelle, more sensitive to revolutionary violence, defined the nationalists as “[t]he implacable rebels [who] are only a small minority of sectarians, fanatics, and criminals of common law to which are added the young, abused by deceitful talk, and sometimes the jobless driven to desperate solutions.”13 Having depicted Algerian nationalists as “criminals” and “fanatics” with a negative influence on the youth, Soustelle interpreted his actions as governor general to be “defensive,” for the protection of both France and Algeria. For Soustelle, the Muslims’ offensive aggression and what he considered to be the politics of Cairo and the CRUA (controlled, he argued, by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the exterior head of the Algerian nationalist movement) constituted something very similar to the Hitlerian threat.
In reality, the overzealous French military reactions to Philippeville destroyed the last chances of political moderation, forcing many of the remaining Algerian Muslims who had formally supported continued cooperation between France and Algeria to part company with Soustelle. For example, and much to Soustelle’s chagrin, on September 26, the Algerian Muslims elected to the Second College (the Muslim and/or non-European representative body in the Algerian Assembly) formally rejected further collaboration with the French in their Declaration of 61, which condemned the “blind repression that strikes a considerable number of innocents.”14 The declaration effectively ended the policy of integration, now considered “dépassée”; it represented a tremendous change in the attitudes of the Muslim politicians, led by Dr. Mohammed Saleh Bendjelloul, who had previously been willing to follow Soustelle’s reforms. With its affirmation of the “idea of the Algerian nation,” it jeopardized Soustelle’s reformist, political agenda.15
The Founding of the Comité d’Action
Another menacing challenge to Soustelle’s politics came from intellectuals inside France. On November 5, 1955, in the Salle Wagram in Paris, the Comité d’Action des Intellectuels contre la Poursuite de la Guerre en Afrique du Nord was founded by Dionys Mascolo and Louis-René des Forêts (both writers and editors at Gallimard), Robert Antelme (a writer), and Edgar Morin (a sociologist and researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique since 1950), who declared: “In addressing ourselves against this war [in Algeria], we defend our own proper principles and liberties. The war in North Africa, in fact, puts the Republic in danger.”16 The four initiators of the Comité wanted to assemble a federation of intellectuals who would fight against the colonial regime and emphasize its independence from political parties.17 Their success was astonishing. In a very short time they collected the signatures of hundreds of writers, artists, professors, and journalists on their first manifesto, which called for all like-minded intellectuals and writers to join the struggle against repression, racism, and blocked negotiations, and for liberation of the African continent.
Despite a handful of intellectuals unwilling to support the manifesto, many of Soustelle’s close friends had signed against his policies, rendering him painfully aware of the full implications of a committee of intellectuals gathering in opposition to the government he was commissioned to protect.18 This left Soustelle, as both intellectual and politician, in an awkward position. In response to the Comité, on November 7, he began a polemic concerning the self-representation of the intellectual that would have repercussions throughout the French-Algerian War and beyond. In his press conference that day, Soustelle challenged the right of the newly founded Comité d’Action to speak for the Algerian nationalists’ cause and address the public as intellectuals.
A few weeks later on November 26, Soustelle published his “A Letter of an Intellectual to a Few Others” in Combat. The title hints at the internal contours of the debate; it was not a response to the Comité per se but rather a letter addressed to “a few” intellectuals, those men Soustelle considered his peers. With a macho zing, Soustelle dismissed the women who signed this manifesto with the contemptuous term “demoiselles.”19 He began by acknowledging the presence on the Comité of some of his male friends and respected colleagues and continued by emphasizing that even his political career had caused him to abandon his academic posts.20 He expressed his firm belief in the value of thought and research. The intellectual, according to Soustelle, had an important role to play in public life, but this role could not consist of substituting “vague passionate images” for the rigors worthy of the profession.
Soustelle did not dispute the notion of political engagement but rather attacked the Comité for what he considered its carelessness and dishonesty. If intellectuals were to engage in politics with organs like the Comité they are “only justified if they behave in this instance and more than ever as intellectuals, that is to say with concern for honesty and clarity which are in some respects our mark.”21 Likewise, if public opinion attached high importance to the words of a professor at the Sorbonne, it was because the public trusted a professor to maintain “strict impartiality.” Whether or not Soustelle actually believed in the mythical notion of intellectual objectivity is not entirely clear; nevertheless, he insisted that the intellectual’s special social status depended on objectivity, and this so-called impartiality could not be compromised by participation in trends such as anticolonialism.
In the spirit of impartiality, Soustelle also announced that he would use his academic skills to “analyze” the manifesto, to illustrate the “weakness” of the Comité’s arguments, and to point out its “demagogic slogans.” He insisted that the Comité was incorrect to use the term war to describe the events in Algeria. Today, Soustelle’s taking issue with the term war seems peculiar, especially since the French military had deployed eighty thousand soldiers in Algeria in 1954. By autumn 1956 France had increased its forces to over four hundred thousand troops. Yet, to Soustelle and those officially in control of the French state, Algeria was France and France could not be at war with itself. This went beyond mere semantics for Soustelle because, if France was not at war, Algerian nationalists could be deemed “terrorists” and “outlaws” (les hors-la-loi).22 Under French jurisdiction and subject to French laws, Algerian nationalists acted in civil disobedience but were not fighting a war. Soustelle argued that the very use of the term war was inappropriate for the Algerian situation and was used by the Comité only to provoke a “guilt complex” in the French. The current crisis was a “very particular state of things”—but not a “war.”
During this “very particular state of things,” Soustelle’s view of the Algerian “rebels” solidified into loathing. His partiality for France’s colonial adventure led to a willful, politicized sleight of hand by substituting the word rebels for terrorists to denote Algerian nationalists. This stratagem corresponded to his desire to legitimate his own intellectual and political identity vis-à-vis the conflict. As a colonial administrator, Soustelle blamed the violence on the indigenous population that repudiated France. As an anthropologist, his views were more curious. He remained devoted to the universalism of French grandeur, which meant that he refused to fault France for years of colonial oppression and denial of basic democratic rights to the Muslim majority. Indeed he wanted both reforms and repression, and he believed that only by striking a proper balance between these two issues would he be able to save French Algeria.
Soustelle’s blatant neglect of France’s historical role in the oppression of Algerian Muslims and his political decisions to intensify repression can be explained by his suspicion of Islam. In his “Letter of an Intellectual to a Few Others,” he argued that Algerian leaders like Ahmed Ben Bella demanded the destruction of all that was European in North Africa, making an analogy between Hitler’s final solution and the Algerian Muslims’ rejection of the French empire. In the end, Soustelle argued, the Muslims would demand conversion to Islam of the remaining Algerians and create a “theocratic state” that would be “a racist member of the Arab League.”23 The outcome would be a united Arab front that would threaten Western democracies. Hence, according to him, the true racists were the Arabs, not the French. If France ceded to the threat of terrorism it would condemn Algeria forever to this totalitarian, Arab-based racism.
Soustelle’s desire to represent Algerians and Arabs as racists and dangerous in his open “Letter” was not aberrant or written in haste. For example, along with a personal letter written on March 30, 1956, to Paul Rivet, Soustelle enclosed a copy of a speech he had just delivered at a conference designed to create a “large union” to “clarify public opinion on Algeria.”24 Besides restating his claim that the leaders of the Algerian revolution were “assassins without mercy” and “pitiful hostages of terror,” he repeated his diatribe against the “pan-Arab” threat. All the while, his depiction of the French role in Algeria remained benign, if not heroic. France, according to him, had never abandoned its democratic principles in Algeria, nor had it systematically tried to exterminate a population, nor was it guilty of forced religious conversion—to which Islam aspired. The logic of his argument, as he himself concluded, was that French military and civil forces currently attempting to “pacify” Algeria merely sought the end of terror for both French and Muslims. The “pacification of hearts” in tandem with systematic economic and social reform would, he argued, have ended the current drama and transformed Algeria into an advanced society on the scale of metropolitan France.
The following week, on December 3, the Comité published its “Response to the Governor General of Algeria,” which focused on self-representation of the legitimate intellectual and the representation of the Algerian nationalists. The Comité characterized intellectuals as those who can use “scientific rigor” to analyze a situation as complicated as Algeria.25 The Comité attacked Soustelle for intellectually failing to see the French role in the conflict, misrepresenting the historical dimensions of colonialism, and escalating violence through his policy of repression. Understanding Algeria required knowledge of Algerians, which in turn meant discerning the real origin of the revolution. Breaking with Soustelle’s naive view of history, the Comité argued that violence did not “date from the day” that Algerians “respond[ed] with arms” (3). Soustelle’s silence on the sources of nationalist violence, the Comité claimed, deformed authentic intellectual identity, and with his objectivity eroded by the bravado of office, Soustelle had become intellectually and indefensibly myopic. In fact, the Comité asked, “Who rapes, pillages, kills, massacres, and tortures, in effect, in Algeria? The French authorities, isn’t it?” (2).
Accepting Soustelle’s claims as true, the Comité continued, would mean misreading the history of the French colonization of Algeria. In protecting its image of the legitimate intellectual from the image Soustelle projected, the Comité argued that his responses were not those of an intellectual but of a Machiavellian representative of a state, whose colonial oppression protected the status quo (4). Any hope of impartiality and intellectual credibility was annulled because Soustelle had betrayed his intellectual obligations by becoming a governmental mouthpiece.
The Comité continued its defense of Algerians and anticolonialism by distancing itself from French colonial practices. Driving a legitimacy wedge between colonialists and anticolonialists, it linked colonialism with French torture and terrorism. France had, the Comité claimed, developed into a “régime concentrationnaire” in Algeria, which reached all levels of the French bureaucracy, police, and administration.26 In order to know better the intensity of repression and severity of the crimes, the Comité asked Soustelle to commission an inquiry into the reports of French abuses and the violation of human rights. This was needed, the letter concluded, because violence was systematic; concentration camps and police-sponsored torture remained undeniable. Hence the Comité insisted that the French military and civilians were guilty of collective assassinations.27
If the Comité distanced itself from the French state, for whom did it claim to speak and who authorized it? It claimed to draw its authority from three main sources: the names of its members (self-representation of intellectuals who have researched the truth), the French in France who manifested their distaste of the war, and the “engaged” nationalist Algerians (4). Backed by these forces, the Comité asked for the establishment of democratic principles, most notably freedom of the press and speech, concerning Algeria. As soon became clear, however, its desire to represent all three aspects forced the Comité into contradictory positions. Moreover, if these were the sources of legitimation the Comité claimed for itself, what did it hope to achieve?
Above all, it also asked for the destruction of illusions. To begin, the Algerian Muslims, according to the Comité, no longer wanted the Statute of 1947. The Comité asked for, among other things, the disbanding of the Algerian Assembly, the recalling of the military contingent, and the restoration of France’s image now defaced by war. The day of progressive politics had passed and it was now the moment to offer Algerians real, democratic change. Nevertheless, in issuing these demands the Comité did not call for the complete separation of Algeria and France: “The path we want to see our country take is neither abandonment nor war: it is that of cooperation in friendship and confidence between two peoples equal in responsibilities and dignity” (4).
From Algiers on December 23, 1955, Soustelle continued the debate with the Comité in his attempts to maintain his dual politico-intellectual career. With another letter he attacked the Comité for not waiting for him to respond before it embarked on a program denouncing his silence. Again he evidenced his disdain for having to mix company with the “anonymous” intellectuals on the Comité and not just those he considered peers.28 Furthermore, he argued that there had already been a commission created to investigate the situation in Algeria. He then fired: “You will permit me in response to raise doubts over the quality and the right of your Comité to substitute itself for the public powers. In the name of whom or what do you arrogate to yourselves this privilege? Who elected or mandated you? Why would I recognize the validity of a mission for which no one else but you is fitted and for which you have already had the imprudence to establish in the total absence of objectivity?”
This direct epistolary polemic continued on January 10, 1956, when the Comité issued its second “Response of the Committee” to Soustelle. This letter displayed the Comité’s complete skepticism concerning mixing intellectual and governmental authority. The heart of this response concluded that Soustelle was willing to engage the truth only insofar as it could be completely distanced from the reality of colonialism. The Comité then turned personal, stating that Soustelle must have been content with his “Letter of an Intellectual to a Few Others” because he had it immediately reprinted and distributed with his photograph and curriculum vitae attached to it. It was “sadly comical,” the Comité stated, to engage in a polemic with a governor general masked in an intellectual’s uniform; it was “comical” because Soustelle had tried to preserve the respect of an intellectual while simultaneously upholding the intellectually and morally dubious policies of the French government—especially the practice of concentration camps in Algeria. Furthermore, it was “sad” because this cost lives and paralleled attempts by the Gestapo to cover its systematic tortures with propaganda.29 Becoming a vehicle of the state, Soustelle, according to the Comité, had been stripped of his privileged stature of intellectual: “You have not known how to remain an intellectual, according to the intellectuals.” Soustelle had transgressed the Comité’s imaginary line between intellectuals and the state.
The Salle Wagram
On January 27, 1956, the Comité ceased its epistolary confrontation and raised its public profile. Combating the policies of the French government and nurturing its identity, which aligned intellectuals with anticolonialism, the Comité held its first major public meeting in Paris’s Salle Wagram. However, as the meeting and subsequent developments would demonstrate, the Comité found it increasingly difficult to maintain a coherent anticolonialist movement in the face of heterogeneous interpretations of anticolonialism, especially as widespread dissension resulting from internecine struggles between rival Algerian groups became more severe. Those giving speeches on January 27 reflected the diversity of anticolonial philosophies. Among those scheduled to speak were Jean Amrouche, Robert Barrat, Aimé Césaire, Alioune Diop, Michel Doo Kingue, Jean Dresch, Daniel Guérin, Michel Leiris, André Mandouze, Dionys Mascolo, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, Joseph Raseta, Jean Rous, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Pierre Stibbe. Each spoke about a different aspect of the war and, with a few exceptions, the effects of the battle with Soustelle could easily be traced to their remarks concerning intellectual legitimacy. The Salle Wagram speeches also demonstrate the difficulty of balancing a desire to maintain Franco-Muslim fraternity, and, at the same, to articulate a coherent, anticolonialist philosophy.
More important, the speakers betrayed an internal struggle within the Comité concerning the identity of the anticolonialist intellectual. One of the most telling and complex efforts to address self-representation and the constitution of intellectual legitimacy was that of Jean Amrouche, the poet and renowned Algerian intellectual. “I am not mandated by anyone,” he said. “I do not belong to any political party. I only represent myself: an intellectual and a citizen.”30 As what he described as an “integrated native” (a Kabylian Catholic), he was proudly aware of his cultural hybridity, the riches of his native land, and the intricate connections between French and Algerian cultures. At once Algerian and French, Amrouche offered personal testimony of this melding: “I am born Algerian, I believe myself to be French.”
For Amrouche there existed two Frances: the continental or metropolitan France of European culture, the true France, and the bastardized version of France, the colonial France that “negated” the real France; this was the “anti-France” (23).31 In this light, Algerians engaged in the conflict were not what Soustelle termed “common-law bandits” but men fighting for identity and dignity, and their struggle was an expression of faith in the universal principles (Rights of Man) that were the true France’s raison d’être. Because the central problem facing intellectuals was to illuminate the real reasons for war, the intellectual had to counteract the lies and official French propaganda. The largest of these lies was integration (Soustelle’s well-known project), which Amrouche argued was a failed policy that sought only to “disarm” the rebels. Integration was a worn-out colonial ideology.
According to Amrouche, his hybridity as an integrated native intellectual gave him the unique ability to assess the most important reasons for the conflict: the psychological and moral effects of the anti-France on the colonized. Because justice and dignity were most important here, the economic considerations at the heart of Soustelle’s plans for reform and integration, he argued, were subsidiary concerns. The “native” has been beaten and forced to live in subjection in the territory of the anti-France, the undemocratic France of lies and misplaced confidences. The most lasting psychological effect was the dogma of “natural inferiority,” and it remained more “rigid and more impenetrable than the most absolute religious dogmas” (26). This demoralization provoked a situation in which there remained no alternative left for the natives other than to rebel; in other words, the violence in Algeria was imminent in the contradiction between the two visions of France. Algerians, as displaced hybrids, stood in this no man’s land between two contradictory French frontiers. Spinning his analysis into a phenomenological framework, Amrouche argued that the Other had not received due respect. The only option left was to “impose” this respect himself because at this point in history, in order to retrieve one’s dignity, it “suffices to proclaim oneself free” (27). (Amrouche was one of the first Algerians to employ the concept of the Other in this regard.)
Paradoxically, even Amrouche, the French Amrouche, believer in the France of enlightened humanism, did not at this stage advocate the complete destruction of ties between France and Algeria. He argued that the very application of the liberal ideas that gave France its majestic place in the world would solve the psychological dimensions of the Algerian problem. Extended cooperation and the recognition of Algerian rights by France could ensure peaceful coexistence between the two peoples. A plan, in short, to abolish the reign of the anti-France was necessary and could only be realized when “free friendship, free fraternity, succeed[ed] the false friendship of the master and the slave” (28). The final reconciliation between French and Algerians was possible because both descended from the same religious ancestry, both had Abraham as their father (29).
Different in his conclusion but not completely in his orientation Aimé Césaire also qualified his authority to speak on behalf of Algerians by his unique identity as a politician (mandataire) of a people that had suffered colonial oppression, hence expressing a parallel between French and Martiniqais culture. Like Soustelle, Césaire’s intellectual credentials were beyond reproach. Educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, then at the École Normale Supérieure, Césaire was a professor at the Lycée of Fort-de-France in 1940–45. He entered politics as deputy of Martinique in 1946 and was reelected in 1951, enrolling in the Communist group of the National Assembly.
Césaire did not buttress his authority by addressing the audience as a “specialist of North Africa,” but rather as a politician who fought for the oppressed.32 For him, France was Janus-faced, divided between colonialists and anticolonialists. For progress to be made during the French-Algerian War, the anticolonialists had to unite and provide information to stand against the oppressive and tyrannical regime. Emphasizing its historical dimension, he isolated the Algerian revolution asone specific manifestation of colonialism’s demise, placing Algeria into the problem of global decolonization. History, moreover, could be divided between two “historical epochs.” The epoch of betrayed confidence was superseded by the epoch that produced the Bandung Conference, for which many countries had united to “proclaim that Europe no longer could unilaterally direct the world” (51).33
Despite Césaire’s rejection of Eurocentrism, it would be wrong to see him as an intellectual who rejected Europe in toto. For him, Europe had played a fundamental part in the history and progress of civilization. However, history had gone as far as it could within the context of colonialism and demanded a new route. Pivotal in the transition of history from the past to the future was the liberation of the oppressed. This would mean that those who struggled in this transition period (the Algerians) could not be seen as “Algerian bandits” or practicing a “regression to the Middle Ages.” History would certainly have its day with Soustelle, who was no doubt “a very civilized man,” because he would be remembered not as an enlightened intellectual who understood the unstoppable currents of historical change but as the last “defender of an illegitimate and barbaric order” (52).
Exiting the historical impasse of colonialism, however, did not require the comprehensive destruction of the connections between France and Algeria. Like his fellow Comité member Amrouche, Césaire invited reconciliation based on a spirit of cooperation. Recognition of the Algerian national identity, not Soustelle’s bogus project of integration, would foster this reconciliation.
Like Amrouche and Césaire, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, a professor in the Faculty of Letters in Paris, spoke of the self-representation of intellectual identity and aligned this identity squarely on the side of anticolonialism. “Intellectuals,” he said, “are those who attempt to understand without limiting themselves to the immediate.”34 This opposition put intellectuals at odds with the established powers, the military, and sometimes the government. In relating his definition of intellectuals to his vision of anticolonialism, Mayoux asked “French patriots” to join forces with “Algerian patriots” in the struggle against the “tyranny that has usurped the name of France” (6). Colonialism was merely a nefarious quid pro quo in the sense that control of democratic institutions in France was compromised by the lack of democracy in Algeria.
Mayoux was not alone in his concern for the internal and external threats to democracy that the war in Algeria posed. Dionys Mascolo, one of the Comité’s founders, argued that Algeria represented one aspect of the struggle against universal colonialism. In order to combat colonialism, Mascolo insisted, the French had to become cognizant of their collective responsibility in the war. Just as Germany had once denied the existence of mass concentration camps, he claimed, so did the French. Fulfilling the intellectual’s role by exposing this atrocity, intellectuals would help create a “universally humane society.”35
Although a universally humane society was the goal, it would have to be realized by a combined Franco-Algerian effort. Algerians needed to rethink their national identity by searching for their cultural roots; the French could assist by denouncing the “practical” and “theoretical” applications of colonialism. The French could then appropriate the Algerians and place them within a society that transcended the limits of a culturally specific and historical situation. “We asked them for their aid, and they have very generously responded to our call. The support that they provide is of an immeasurable price” (10).
Following the same theme of the internalization of the conflict, Alioune Diop, director of Présence africaine, insisted that intellectuals ought to concentrate on the oppressor and not just the oppressed. In his words, intellectuals were compelled to condemn the “harmfulness of colonialism for the colonizer,” and the Comité was an empirical manifestation of this responsibility.36 Even Diop suggested that fraternity could be reestablished through a universal struggle against capitalism. Exploitation in the colonies was not fundamentally different from that in Europe—a collective identity was forged by an ontological sameness derived from capitalist exploitation, as it were, and this bound peoples in ways cultural sameness did not. In order for advances to be made, the workers in colonies and Europe had to realize that war in Algeria embodied not a conflict between civilizations but a battle against collective, capitalist oppression.
Sartre’s Salle Wagram speech echoed Diop’s, especially the effort to universalize the Algerian situation and underscore the relationship between colonialism and capitalism. In theorizing colonialism’s systematic effects, Sartre argued that Algeria represented “the most readable” model of the colonial system at work.37 Hence the Algerian revolution was at once an expression of a global trend toward nationalism and a revolt against capitalistic exploitation. The connection, for Sartre, was obvious because colonialism’s antidemocratic exploitation was founded on racism, supported by military force, and characterized by economic, social, and psychological aspects. Colonialism created an economy in which Algerians could be controlled; it amplified educational and institutional differences between Algerians and European settlers (colons), and it fabricated psychological subhumans (sous-homme), convinced of their own inferiority. In order to combat colonialism these three nefarious components of systemic oppression had to be “tranquilized.” Yet, somewhat ironically, while advocating this tranquilization, for the moment not even Sartre incited Algerians to destroy all existing connections between France and Algeria: “if they feed their hunger, if they work, and if they know how to read, there will no longer be the shame of being sub-human and we will find again the old Franco-Muslim fraternity” (26).
But the system was inherently doomed. In Hegelian fashion, Sartre argued that the three-tiered separation of Algerians from colons had kept Algerians outside the system and allowed them, forced them in fact, to become conscious of their own separate identity. Economic, social, and psychological segregation, therefore, had inadvertently contributed to the Algerians’ becoming cognizant of their national identity. Similarly, Sartre believed that the fascist need of the European colons in Algeria to resort to force (the military and the police) had created a systemic dependence on the military. These contradictions were deeply implanted and could only be escaped through the demise of the system.
It was the role of the French intellectual, Sartre argued, to slay colonialism. The French intellectual’s own identity mandated this final act because metropolitan French political and social institutions had been infected by the mockery of fascist racism radiating from Algeria. As a result, Soustelle’s “neocolonialism” had to be stopped. Only by removing the impediments to justice and real social reform, by cutting the colons’ resources of force, could “a free France and liberated Algeria” be achieved (47). In this sense, the struggle for a liberated Algeria was “at once” a struggle for France and for Algeria against “colonial tyranny” (48)
Is There an Orthodox Anticolonialism?
During the January 27 meeting there were two unscheduled speeches. Different reactions within the Comité to the speakers, André Mandouze and Moulay Merbah, reveal a great deal about the tensions that emerged from the desire to merge the identity of the anticolonialist intellectual with a coherent representation of Algerian nationalism. The first real fissures surfaced in response to the FLN’s systematic use of violence to eradicate Algerian opposition. The FLN’s main Algerian political rival, the MNA, was formed in December 1954 by longtime Algerian nationalist Messali Hadj. Moulay Merbah, a principal supporter of Messali Hadj, acted as the MNA’s representative in Europe and at the United Nations and had come to the meeting to discuss the Algerian situation.
André Mandouze, the other unscheduled speaker at the Salle Wagram meeting, delivered a blistering speech titled “Admit the Facts.” A professor in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Algiers, Mandouze had long been engaged in the Algerian struggle.38 His sympathies for the FLN and antipathy for the MNA were well known, as was his characteristic briskness. At the time of his speech, Mandouze was perhaps the French intellectual most directly engaged in the daily combat of the Algerians. Delivering his speech, he did not miss the opportunity to refer to his last visit to Salle Wagram during Liberation. A decade later he pointed to the ironic parallels with the unlearned Nazi lessons of the past, which were a cause for shame for the French people. Just as the French Resistance had once fought against the Nazi oppression, the FLN’s military branch, the Armée de Libération Nationale (aln), now struggled bitterly against a similar fascist occupation.
Mandouze’s self-declared position as direct FLN spokesman lent his speech an air of bitter superiority. In his words, he had nothing but disdain for “mere talking” and “holding colloquia” on the Algerian situation. He had come to bring a message of support from the FLN and to urge the Comité to respond by using all its influence to force immediate political negotiations between France and Algeria. Moreover, noticeably distanced from French interests, Mandouze represented the FLN cause directly, and from this position he criticized the Eurocentric appropriation of the Algerian struggles against colonialism by the very French intellectuals to whom he spoke. “You have to do more, my dear friends, than gather and applaud those who speak the truth. Tomorrow you have to demand from those whom you have given power that they recognize and understand the fact of Algeria and the opening of negotiations.”39 This must be done, he continued, without the slightest hint of paternalism and with the knowledge that in the battle for liberation, only the combatants (the Algerians) will have won.
Mandouze’s optimism concerning negotiations did not appear entirely misplaced.40 At first sight, his open support for the FLN might not seem very provocative, but reactions within the Comité were passionate. Perhaps the fact that Salle Wagram had been filled largely with an Algerian audience that sided with Messali Hadj, the MNA leader and principal Algerian opponent of the FLN, influenced matters.
More important, Mandouze had touched a nerve in the Comité. Daniel Guérin, a writer and longtime opponent of colonialism, a friend of Messali Hadj, and a Trotskyite (anti-PCF) member of the Comité, wrote an open letter protesting the Comité’s decision to give a second hearing to a French representative of the FLN. Addressed to his “Dear Colleagues” on January 29, he published it in Libertaire on February 2. While commending the founders of the Comité, notably Edgar Morin, for their excellent work and “biting” response to Soustelle, Guérin’s letter highlighted the undercurrent of discord among the Comité members concerning the politics of representing Algerian nationalists and defining the proper anticolonialist policy for French intellectuals. For example, in a Comité meeting just before the January 27 gathering, despite the objection of Edgar Morin and the absence of Sartre, the Central Bureau had decided not to mention Messali Hadj’s name during the Wagram meeting.41 Guérin, who also delivered a speech on January 27, had submitted his text to the bureau in advance and was urged not to comment on the history of Algerian nationalism (which would have placed heavy emphasis on Messali), but rather to describe the way Algerians have been made to feel as “strangers in their own country.”42 Guérin refused to participate in this political maneuver that would have benefited the FLN by excluding Messali, insisting that it was not possible to treat the history of Algerian nationalism without situating him in this history. At Wagram, Dionys Mascolo attempted to stop Guérin from taking the stand, and Guérin delivered only part of his speech. According to Guérin, this intentional distortion of the history of nationalism, which he rightly termed the “absence of impartiality,” led to the direct attempt by some Comité members to support the FLN in its struggles against the MNA. In Guérin’s eyes this distortion of history and Algerian politics and abuse of the very argument about objectivity that anti-colonialist intellectuals had used against Soustelle would destroy the Comité’s public authority.
Guérin was not alone in his criticism of Comité actions. For example, in 1959 Edgar Morin admitted in Autocritique that when the Comité was founded most members were “profoundly ignorant of all Algerian political realities and incapable of discerning the meaning of the labels CRUA, FLN, MNA.”43 According to Morin, Mascolo, Antelme, and the Sartrians on the Comité believed that Messali was under Soustelle’s control; Morin claimed that he, Robert Chérmany, and Guérin were the only ones who defended the historical veracity of Messali’s role in the development of Algerian nationalism. Because of the pro-Messali show of force at the Wagram meeting, some Comité members actually discussed expelling Chérmany for having plotted against the Comité by recruiting a considerable anti-FLN Algerian audience.44 This was, according to Morin, the beginning of the rupture within the Comité (192).45 This problem came with the realization that the Comité’s desire to lead a clean anticolonial campaign was being debased by a naive and dangerous effort by some members to use it as a means for giving the FLN more standing as the only legitimate nationalist movement in Algeria. More recently, in 1998, Morin admitted that the tendency among the French left was to equate the FLN with the “avant-garde of the worldwide Revolution.”46
In many ways, Guérin alerted intellectuals to the potential danger of mixing the politics of internationalism with anticolonialism. To drive home his point, he cited Jean Dresch’s “deplorable” speech (also given at the Salle Wagram meeting), which presented the “poor European colons of Algeria!” as the real victims of colonialism.47 With the large number of Algerians in the audience, this duplicitous effort to substitute Algerian nationalists’ concerns for so-called proletariat concerns eroded the confidence of Algerians in French intellectuals’ ability to swing the public’s support behind the Algerian cause. It was clear to any audience member, Guérin argued, that Dresch (and other Communist intellectuals) denied the cultural specificity of the Algerian revolution by merging the Algerians and the colons into the same fraudulent Marxist interpretative grid of universal exploitation. Guérin therefore urged the Comité to distance itself from this manner of interpreting Algeria, otherwise its prestige would be severely tarnished.
According to Guérin, the final and perhaps most disturbing event of the gathering related to the attempt to deny Moulay Merbah—the only Algerian Muslim speaker—the right to take the microphone in the name of the MNA. What was particularly insulting for Algerians, Guérin pointed out, was that the effort to block Merbah came after affording André Mandouze— a Frenchman representing the FLN—the same privilege. After protests by the Comité, Merbah did deliver his speech, but it was the only one censored out of the Comité’s publication. The Comité’s paternalism and hypocrisy vis-à-vis Algerian nationalists, according to Guérin, became transparent when the members who had opposed Merbah’s unforeseen speech refused to applaud and even gave the impression of “sickly laughter [rire jaune]” (2).48
This disgusting behavior compromised the Comité’s ability to launch a legitimate crusade against colonialism and even endangered its right to speak about decolonization. To restore its image, the Comité would have to show more respect for Algerians, who, after all, were the victims of colonial oppression. And the Comité could not side with one nationalist faction against another. As Guérin stated, “Some of us, my dear colleagues, are not prepared for a committee of intellectuals, founded on a noble goal, to become a camp of disloyal intrigues at the end of which liberal thought is incarcerated. And we hope… that the bureau will observe strict impartiality towards all of the different tendencies of the Algerian resistance, all victims of the same repression” (2).
Guérin’s challenge would not go unanswered, but it was not clear whether the Comité could overcome its disunity. Fractures in the united anticolonial front began to appear soon thereafter. Four days after the publication of Guérin’s letter, Régis Blachère, a professor at the Collège de France, widely respected Islamic scholar, translator of the Qur’an, and member of the Comité, wrote a brief letter to Guérin denouncing his Salle Wagram speech.49 He said Guérin replaced a “blind hatred” of colonialism with pan-Islamism: “Pan-Arabism is a monster as redoubtable as colonialism. Between the two, why choose? They both are at odds in North Africa, and Algeria will die from them. Permit me to not follow you because I do not want to have to ask myself each night: how much spilled blood am I responsible for today.”50 Blachère’s criticisms of pan-Arabism were not new and had already put him at odds with Guérin and others. On December 13, 1954, Guérin had written to François Mauriac of his fear that Blachère’s anti-Arab stance was becoming the “focus” of a different group, the Comité France-Maghreb.51 Hence, in the quarrel between Guérin and the Comité, Blachère interpreted Guérin’s desire for “impartiality” as playing into a pan-Arabism that would be far more oppressive than French colonial rule.
On February 10 Guérin widened his campaign against the Comité’s interpretation of Algerian nationalism by writing to the Tunisian leader Habib Bourguiba. Guérin asked him to have courage to “take a position against the calumniators of Messali” and explained that he had already protested the Comité’s effort to keep Messali from receiving just representation.52 The attack against Messali, according to Guérin, was derived from three sources: the Communists, who had never “annexed” Messali; Abdel Nasser, who had no use for Messali’s tactics; and the Muslims, who had not joined the FLN and disliked the “proletarian composition” of the Messalists.
The Comité responded to Guérin’s public criticisms in its February 18 bulletin. Chastising him for bringing an internal conflict into the open, the Comité again insisted on impartiality and reiterated that it did not wish to enter the Algerians’ internal political struggles. It then averred that Merbah had been wrong to come as Messali Hadj’s representative without its consent.53 Such patronage, the Comité wrote, was inappropriate because it was not created to cater to the “representations of one tendency more than another in the heart of the Algerian resistance.” To better serve the Algerian cause, the Comité had to be above the fray, outside the immediate political manifestations of Algerian nationalism.
Members of the Comité also offered private criticism of Guérin. In an unsigned letter, one member wrote of Guérin’s self-righteousness:
I deplore this war of little papers among comrades united for the defense of a just cause; I deplore that these questions of personal amour-propre can lead to these deformed facts and men; I deplore that Mr. Guérin, due to his egocentrism, has come to denounce, despite of how he thinks of his qualifications… the intervention of one of our colleagues on the Comité [Mandouze]. … Mr. Guérin seems to be a “Messalist,” yet he serves neither that tendency, nor the cause of a free Algeria, nor that of the French conscience.54
In a more personal exchange, Mascolo wrote Guérin explaining that an attitude of strict impartiality had indeed been observed. “If certain members of the Bureau have already individually taken a position in favor of Messalism, there will not be found any who have already taken positions in favor of the FLN.”55 Then, in an attempt to define the nature and the goals of anticolonialism again, Mascolo wrote:
Where you see the maneuvers, there is nothing but care, very firm, it is true, care to be clean, not to dupe anyone and not to be duped by anyone—not to have sentimental preferences or to be partisan. Can you not conceive of this? To abandon such an attitude would be to play the game, certainly defensible, which would not suit us but would suit a political party. We are not a party. This is why we are able to do something that a party cannot. Otherwise, we would be reduced to feebleness…. Again, you are not with those who have worked during these last months to ensure the Comité’s success or to give it direction. Your censor-like attitude is really facile, very unjust, and completely out of place….
It is misery, dear Sir, misery which forces us to be on the lookout for every good intention. And it’s a waste of time, even a waste of time to have to write you like this. Everything is destined to end in sadness, pure and simple, where nothing will make sense.
Metropolitan France’s anticolonialist movement had been imperiled by the temptation of taking sides in the FLN-MNA fratricide, but there were other challenges to a united anticolonialism on the horizon. These came into view in Guérin’s critique of Francis and Colette Jeanson’s important discussion of the Algerian crisis, L’Algérie hors la loi, in France observateur in the interest of “public opinion.”56 Guérin commenced his review by praising his fellow Comité members’ courageous and overdue book on Algeria and ended with criticisms similar to those he had made concerning the Salle Wagram meeting. In particular, he lambasted the book for demonstrating a bias against Messali Hadj and preference for the FLN “without any attempt at impartiality.” Moreover, Guérin criticized the Jeansons for misquoting a private conversation between Islamic scholar Louis Massignon and Soustelle in which Massignon said that Messali was the “last card” for the French to play in Algeria. (Massignon later publicly disavowed this claim.) While defending Messali against the Jeansons’ siding with the FLN, Guérin urged fellow anticolonialists to stay out of the Algerians’ internal battles.
Guérin was not flying solo in his attack on the Jeansons’ book. Jean Daniel, who would arguably become the most important journalist in France, joined the chorus of intellectual discord. Daniel’s French-Algerian Jewish origin no doubt figured critically in his understanding of Algeria and his decision to join the Comité, and he published “Between Sorrow and Shrugged Shoulders” in L’Express because he was infuriated that Francis Jeanson, like Soustelle, “believed himself to incarnate Algeria.”57 This selfarrogation of the role of the “anticolonialist” intellectual, Daniel insisted, illustrated a larger problem: “There is now an orthodox anticolonialism just as there is an orthodox Communism. The dogma of this orthodoxy is not the well-being of the colonized but the mortification of the colonizers.” Daniel claimed that Jeanson believed himself more capable of judging the revolution than its leaders. In this sense, Jeanson’s obvious solidarity with the FLN evidenced bad faith because Jeanson thought himself “qualified to give out certificates of Algerian patriotism to the Algerians of his choice.”
In response, Francis Jeanson wrote a semi-open letter to Daniel. Knowing that L’Express would not publish it, Jeanson had copies printed and sent to approximately one hundred “well-chosen” Parisian intellectuals. Jeanson wanted to offer a response to Daniel that would not be public enough to turn the already skeptical public opinion against intellectuals and the higher causes of Algerian nationalism and anticolonialism.58 Jeanson referred to their mutual membership in the Comité and argued that this should produce reciprocal respect that would override intellectuals’ individual differences.59 Wholly enmeshed himself in the FLN-MNA conflict, Jeanson chastised Daniel for pretending that there existed a real political force inside Algeria other than the FLN. Moreover, Jeanson attacked Daniel’s charge that he was attempting to divide the French left through his discussions of anticolonialism in France. What Daniel really feared, he argued, was the exposure of the new forms of neocolonialism in France, particularly at L’Express.
But what about the revolutionary violence of the FLN? Jeanson reminded Daniel that L’Express had been reluctant to discuss the violence of the “rebels,” but that when it did it misrepresented violence, especially when arguing that “‘nothing excuses the massacres [of the French], and their authors will not escape judgment’” (6). Jeanson also contended that the “sensational facts,” the news of the massacres that Daniel and his colleagues reported, led to the wrong conclusions. “A Frenchman,” Jeanson wrote, “does not have the right to say, in relation to adverse violence: ‘Nothing excuses these massacres…’ because if this were the case, the chapter would have been long closed” (7). The time had come, Jeanson argued, to choose between the various aspects of the Algerian resistance, even for the French because there were only two forces left in Algeria: the army and the resistance (maquisards). Not involving oneself, Jeanson concluded, would ultimately play into the hands of the neocolonialism disguised as current anticolonialism.
As debates raged in the Comité over the proper role of anticolonial intellectuals, Soustelle’s term as governor general of Algeria ended in February 1956, and his integration policies were now largely considered impossible. Extremism among both Algerian nationalists and French in Algeria increased. In February the new prime minister of France, Guy Mollet, was forced to withdraw the nomination of seventy-nine-year-old General Georges Catroux (Vichy governor general in Indochina) as Soustelle’s replacement after the ultras mounted open opposition.60 This capitulation to extremists who considered Catroux too liberal and too old eroded the government’s authority and hindered promises of reform. Soustelle’s eventual successor, Robert Lacoste, held his newly created post as resident minister for slightly over two years; during his tenure the French military presence grew to nearly half a million troops.61
Finally, on March 12, 1956, the French National Assembly voted for the Special Powers Act, which gave the French military authorities unrestricted power to resolve the conflict in Algeria and would weigh heavily on France in the upcoming years. Even the PCF ceded with very little resistance to the demands of the new Socialist government. Three weeks later Claude Bourdet, France observateur journalist and member of the Comité, was arrested for his article “Demoralization of the Army,” signaling the government’s impatience with intellectual criticism.
As if things were not already going badly enough for the Comité, on April 24 a group of right-wing civilians assaulted members during a reunion in Salle Wagram presided over by Jean-Jacques Mayoux. When Yves Dechezelles pronounced the names of Claude Bourdet and the France observateur at the meeting, the group of militants shouted “Treason!” and began an assault that lasted about half an hour. The real scandal, according to Mayoux, was the collusion between the police and these “fascists” because the French authorities did nothing to prevent the attack on the Comité
By May 1956, and despite its internal intellectual fragmentation, the executive head of the Comité resolved to step up its crusade against the war. In the grandest of intellectual traditions, the Comité would use publications to “demystify” the war and provide “positive information.”62 Information would also be disseminated in the spirit of absolute impartiality, and the FLN’s and MNA’s own words would be used to combat the lies and misinformation of the “official” French press and the government.63
In its May bulletin, the Comité reprinted an FLN communiqué that stated the FLN’s goals and objections to the slanderous portrayal of the Algerian resistance by the French government and press. Furthermore, the Comité attacked the French government’s use of epithets such as “bandits” and “assassins” applied to legitimate Algerian nationalists as ignorant attempts to mislead French public opinion. Giving equal weight to the MNA, the Comité allowed Messali Hadj to respond to a series of questions ranging from the MNA’s aspirations to the problem of citizenship for the European minority.
Then the Comité qualified its right to speak about Algeria. It addressed the French colons’ claim that only those actually in Algeria or familiar with the realities of Algeria could legitimately speak about the colonial regime. The Comité asked whether the identity acquired from being on the soil gave one more authority, in fact ultimate authority, to speak about the events of Algeria. Intellectuals, the Comité responded, could not accept this specious argument because doing so would accord the French in Algeria a monopoly on French interests and give them moral and political authority vis-à-vis the metropolitan French (16). Moreover, to combat “seigneurs of colonization” (the men who ran the French colon press in Algeria), the Comité acknowledged that it would have to do more.
As a result, one of the central tasks of the Comité’s intellectuals was to collect and diffuse information concerning Algeria. Information concerning terrorism was perhaps most important, and rather than deny the existence of Algerian terrorism, the Comité insisted that terrorism now remained the sole means for the Algerians to fight against colonial oppression. The Comité’s members did not unanimously condone terror, though they did agree that terrorism was a product of French colonialism and not the cause of the current crisis.
This, of course, magnified the polemic already underway between intellectuals and the government. On May 12, 1956, a splinter group of the Comité wrote an open letter to Mollet’s government.64 Its title, “The Ethnologists’ Letter,” underlined their intellectual authority. The text (which received little press attention) was republished with a brief introduction stating in the authors’ own words the letter’s importance. The text was even more unusual because most of its signers had rarely taken open political positions. It invoked the names of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gaston Wiet, and Charles-André Julien, all eminent in their fields, to dispel any doubts about intellectual credibility. Assembling more intellectual capital in the prologue, the letter went on to state that one professor from the Collège de France, two professors from the Sorbonne, five directors of study at the École des Hautes Études, and so on signed together as intellectual elites against France’s attempts to maintain its colonial empire.
They argued that their titles endowed them with double obligations: as citizens they had the responsibility to acknowledge the truth concerning the French crimes in Algeria, and as ethnologists they were charged with defending other civilizations. They asked Mollet and his administration to recognize the revolution as the “expression of an authentic sentiment” among the Algerian people and not just an isolated case of a few “rebels” leading a rebellion (2). The Muslims’ violence was a response to the French attempts to stamp out a misunderstood revolution. Violence was also the only means at the Muslims’ disposal to express their self-determination. The French government simply had to acknowledge that, like other former colonized peoples (India, Indochina, Egypt), Algerians could no longer tolerate inequality by Europeans and that the first right of equality was selfdetermination (3). Following Guérin’s lead of impartiality, the ethnologists asked for a cease-fire and direct negotiations with the leaders of all Algerian factions. They hoped for continued relations between France and Algeria that would extend the universal humanism and principles of the Rights of Man.
In June 1956 another important subgroup of the Comité’s intellectuals offered “The Opinion of the University’s Arab Specialists.”65 As “qualified specialists in Arabic and Islamic problems,” they attacked the current us-age of the term “pan-Arabism,” which made it appear that there was no possible compromise to be reached in North Africa. It was “undeniable” the Arabs would be proud of their past and find solidarity in it, the group argued, but that did not mean that they would make Algeria into a uniquely Arab state. “We do not misunderstand,” the group continued, “the difficulty of the problem posed by the co-existence of the two ethnic and religious communities. But from our experience with the Muslim world we estimate that the sole viable solution will be obtained from the negotiations with the partner who truly expresses the aspirations of the Algerian Muslims.”
Suez and Budapest
By the end of 1956 the struggle against colonialism had changed completely. In March, Tunisia and Morocco obtained independence, thus opening up two important strategic sources of support for the Algerian revolutionaries. In August and September, a group of about fifty internal Algerian leaders gathered at the Soumma Valley Congress to reorient Algeria’s struggle for independence. At this meeting, the FLN emerged as the dominant political representative of the Algerian people, and a political tract outlining the goals of the revolution created overarching political institutions, most notably, the Conseil Nationale de la Révolution Algérienne (cnra). Perhaps the most important resolution of the conference was the reiteration that a cease-fire would not be discussed until the French authorities ceded independence. The French government then closed the Algerian Assembly on April 11, killing the last hopes of political resolution within Algeria’s existing parliamentary system. After a long period of hesitancy, the Parti Communiste Algérien (pca) finally attempted a rapprochement with the FLN. The FLN wanted their support as individuals, though not as a party, and the PCA voted to dissolve itself on July 1.
Other world events also began to impinge on the nature of French anticolonialism. On July 26, 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser, did the inconceivable by nationalizing the Suez Canal. Four days later Guy Mollet described him as “an apprentice dictator” analogous to Hitler. In August the British commenced diplomatic negotiations on the canal by inviting representatives of twenty-three countries to London. On October 23, Israel used the opportunity to start Operation Kadesky, with which it captured nearly the entire Sinai Peninsula. On October 30, the Anglo-French coalition sent an ultimatum for the withdrawal of all troops from within ten miles of the canal. The ultimatum going unheeded, the Anglo-French forces landed in Port Said, and on November 6 a cease-fire was called. The un General Assembly asked Great Britain and France to withdraw their forces, accusing Israel, France, and Great Britain of colluding. By December 22, under U.S. pressure, all British and French forces withdrew from the canal.
On October 23, of much more significance for the anticolonialist movement in France, students at Budapest University set off a national uprising by advocating independence from the Soviets. Within five days, the country was almost completely liberated. Imre Nagy, who had become prime minister on October 24, called for the full and immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. On November 1, Nagy went even further by declaring Hungary a neutral country and asked the United Nations to recognize this status. Three days later Soviet tanks entered the capital, and Nagy, who sought refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, was captured and deported to Romania. Within a short time the Soviets regained control of the country and smashed the democratic uprising. The Soviet repression of Hungary sent shock waves throughout the world. Europeans were deeply disturbed, and Communist or Communist-sympathizing French intellectuals faced a nagging question: would they criticize or even break with the Soviet Communists and how would this affect the anticolonialist movement?66
Communist intellectuals in the Comité had been forced to address these issues earlier in the year when Khrushchev’s February 25 report revealed Stalin’s crimes. In his letter to PCF secretary general Maurice Thorez, written on the same day as the Hungarian uprising, Aimé Césaire testified that Khrushchev’s revelations were both positive and negative: they revealed the horrible crimes committed by Stalin but offered optimism concerning the possibilities of de-Stalinization. But Césaire unleashed harsh criticisms of PCF chauvinism and deceitfulness regarding the colonial question. The PCF, he claimed, was merely using the oppressed to benefit the party.67 Moreover, Césaire stated that there would never be an African, West Indian, or Madagascan Communism because “the Parti Communiste Français thinks of the colonial peoples in terms of ruling and demanding and because the anticolonialism, even of the French Communists, still carries the stigmas of the colonialism it combats” (470). Speaking specifically for blacks, Césaire realized that the time to terminate his cohabitation with the PCF had come. Resigning, he insisted that the party had failed him (and colonized peoples) because its universalism annihilated the particular, and colonialism had to be understood as a local phenomenon.
Hence, even before the weight of Soviet suppression of Hungary had sunk in, Césaire sensed there was something unpardonable in the French left’s appropriation of the oppressed. This tension in the French left and the Comité exploded after Hungary. On November 8, the France observateur published its text “Against Soviet Intervention.” Those who signed the text agreed that “socialism” could not be “introduced with bayonets.”68 On November 9, in L’Express, Sartre denounced the crimes of Budapest. Although it may be true, as Tony Judt points out, that Sartre never publicly denounced the Soviet labor camps or Soviet anti-Semitism,69 Sartre did state, “I entirely and without any reservations condemn the Soviet aggression. Without making the Soviet people responsible, I repeat that its current government has committed a crime… which today goes beyond the Stalinism that has already been denounced.”70
The effect of Budapest on the Comité was devastating. The Comité’s executive met on November 21, to discuss Hungary. It decided to distribute a circular to all Comité members asking them to choose among three possible responses to Budapest: (1) to concentrate on fighting against the war in Algeria, despite the similarities between the Soviet suppression of Hungary and French pacification of Algeria; (2) to condemn, with equal force, the war in Algeria and the repression of Budapest; and (3) not only to condemn without reserve the force used in Hungary, but to demand that all members of the Comité announce publicly their condemnation of the Soviet Union.71 A general meeting was called for November 23. Reactions were diverse but nevertheless destroyed the Comité.
How did the Soviet intervention in Hungary effectively decapitate the first and only substantially unified intellectual anticolonialist movement in France during the war? The comments of Jean-Marie Domenach, editor of the moderate-left Christian journal L’Esprit and a member of the Comité, help us understand the connection. While the Comité’s principal aim was to bring peace to Algeria, Domenach admitted, Budapest posed inescapable questions “of logic, of coherence, and of morality.”72 Knowing that the success of his journal depended on public opinion, Domenach admitted that it was not possible for him to continue collaborating with a Comité that did not publicly condemn the Soviet intervention in Hungary.
Characteristically, not everyone agreed. For example, in the general meeting Daniel Guérin stated that the Comité should not denounce the Soviets because it was a “bad idea” that could destroy the Comité whose “unique mission was to continue to struggle against the war in Algeria.”73 Others, like Sartre, went so far as to start their own petitions opposing the Soviet actions in Budapest.74 For most of the members of the Comité, Budapest had rendered it impossible to maintain a coherent anticolonialist identity because it forced existing divisions between left, moderate, and extreme left-oriented intellectuals onto an embarrassing world stage where it was impossible to keep Soviet imperialism and French colonialism separated.75 Edgar Morin recounted its paralyzing effect. “It was not possible to denounce French imperialism in Algeria, without denouncing something analogous to what the Soviet Union was doing in Hungary.”76 In his private notes just after Budapest, and in reference to the attempt to call for a meeting to denounce Budapest, Dionys Mascolo asked himself ironically whether members such as Jean Dresch would today participate in a “meeting for the right of people to act by themselves” against a Communist regime as he had done for Algeria in January? “Sinister joke…. Now the Comité is paralyzed by the smallest possibility of talking tomorrow of the people’s right to dispose of themselves.”77
Mascolo’s response to this crisis, as a founder of the Comité, was to ask the Communists to leave the Comité in order for it to continue its assault on colonialism.78 But even that was not enough to salvage the Comité so, on November 11, 1956, he wrote his own letter of resignation:
It is not only odious, it is also ridiculous for a company of men to protest against the arrest of a few militant anticolonialists and then elect to treat the workers, soldiers, and intellectuals in the Hungarian insurrection as fascists—just as Soustelle and the traitors of the socialist government of official France call the Algerian militants and terrorists bandits. I am not sectarian, but anticolonialism should be total: it is a principle….
I know that legally—by the statutes—those of whom I speak cannot be chased from the Comité. I regret this. I invite them personally to leave it themselves.79
The Dissolution of the Comité
Budapest, although not an isolated incident of discord among intellectuals, was the weight that sank the first and only unified anticolonialist movement during the war. The problems the Comité faced regarding the MNA, the FLN, and the violence would no doubt destroy the Comité as well. But because the Comité’s might came from its independence from political parties in general and the PCF specifically, adherence of both Communists and nonCommunists both blessed and cursed it. The Comité was skating on the thin ice of unified anticolonialism that simply gave way to the crushing force of the Soviet tanks in Budapest.
The cohesion among the members of the Comité and its eventual rupture provide us with a good point of entry into the complexities of identity at the beginning of the French-Algerian War. The initial phase of the Comité’s life illustrates the ability of a large body of French intellectuals to unite against colonialism. The Comité’s ability to unify against this common enemy served two separate but related functions for French intellectuals: it provided them with a means to engage in France’s internal politics and it symbolized a genuine concern for the oppressed. However, as was the case through the entire war, struggles against colonialism were continually compromised by a host of interrelated concerns stemming from a twofold problem: the politics of both representing the anticolonialist’s identity and representing and appropriating the colonized’s identity.
Unquestionably, the representation of Algerian identity and Algerian politics remained a constant source of friction for French intellectuals. Guérin and Daniel were perhaps the first to point out that siding with the FLN or the MNA would compromise the “objective” nature of the anticolonialists’ mission. The criticisms Guérin leveled at some Comité members for their attempts to appropriate the Algerians’ struggle for Communist purposes, thus misrepresenting the unique cultural and historical aspects of Algeria’s revolution, announced a central question that would have a lasting epistemological and political impact on the anticolonialist movement.
Ironically, the final blow to the Comité did not come from Soustelle’s attacks; his criticisms actually benefited the anticolonialists’ campaign. Rather, the cancer consuming the Comité became malignant when the unity of the anticolonialist identity came under scrutiny. Since most anticolonialists were members of the ideological left but were by no means Communists, it became imperative to define and redefine, present and represent, legitimize and “relegitimize” their anticolonialist identity. Nonetheless, by late 1956 it had become impossible to orient intellectual identity and public opinion as a unified intellectual front.