3. French Educational Reform and the Problem of Reconciliation: The Service des Centres Sociaux

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Sure, now they recognize their mistakes. Is that really the case? We cannot be sure. You do not recognize anything, you do not regret anything. It is still bad faith to speak about mistakes. From the very beginning, they knew what had to be done in order to be on good terms with the natives. They also knew what was required in order to be the only ones to benefit from colonization, much to the detriment of the native. They had to exploit him, make him sweat, beat him, and keep him ignorant. In the beginning, there was a choice to be made, and they made it. Why talk about mistakes at this point?

MOULOUD FERAOUN, November–December 1955

Mid-morning on March 15, 1962, in the Algiers suburb of El Biar, two OAS death squads interrupted what would be the final planning session of an ill-fated French educational institution known as the Centres Sociaux Éducatifs en Algérie. With weapons in hand, Gabriel Anglade and Joseph Rizza led their fascist comrades in the DELTA5 and DELTA9 OAS squads respectively into a tranquil administrative planning session and ordered seven men—Marcel Basset, Marcel Aimard, Ali Hammoutene, Mouloud Feraoun, Maxime Marchand, Salah Ould Aoudia, and Jean Petitbon—to follow them immediately.1 Fortunately, for him, Petitbon was absent. The other six un-fortunate and confused men were quickly ushered outside into the warm Mediterranean sunshine in the courtyard of the Château-Royal, the building that housed the administrative offices of the Centres Sociaux. Within seconds, as some of the victims’ own children looked on, the six men were forced to line up against the wall. The fascists took aim. The six educators were riddled by machine guns. Three were French; three were Algerian. All were intellectuals. In one awful morning, just three days before the Evian Accords ended the war, this desperate fascist orgy of violence simultaneously liquidated the leadership of the Centres Sociaux and definitively ended hopes for lasting Franco-Muslim solidarity.2

This massacre was certainly not just another random act of savagery by the OAS. According to Alexander Harrison, the Centres leadership was scheduled to meet on that day with one of the “chiefs of staff of the barbouzes, Jean Petitbon, to discuss future strategy.”3 Aware that peace was in the air, the OAS troops, which had been menacing Algeria for the past year, immediately shifted their tactics in a last-ditch effort to disrupt the peaceful transition. The OAS death squads meant to institute a policy of absolute terror against Algerian Muslims and against officials of the French state. Nevertheless, and despite the senseless and grotesque massacre at El Biar on March 19, 1962, an official cease-fire went into effect.

But why were intellectuals and educators working for the Centres Sociaux targeted by one of the most notorious fascist organizations in French history, and why would a paramilitary group such as the OAS deliberately decapitate the intellectuals and the leadership of the only institution dedicated to the promotion of Franco-Muslim solidarity in Algeria? To answer these and other questions, we must consider the role of intellectuals during decolonization from yet another angle. The Centres Sociaux stands at the interstices between intellectual, cultural, social history, and military history, thus raising the question of when, if ever, this kind of intellectual engagement can have a positive social effect. The Centres Sociaux was a relatively small program, but it is emblematic of larger cultural, intellectual, and social problems that arose during the last years of French colonialism in Algeria.

Origins and Goals of the Centres Sociaux

About a year after the outbreak of the Algerian war and for the first time since the conquest of Algeria in 1830, the French government formally initiated a plan for global educational reform in Algeria.4 This reform emphasized two principal objectives: combating the poverty of Algeria’s underdeveloped population and fostering a viable Franco-Muslim community.5 The metropolitan government hoped that in instituting these reforms the Muslim community would be able to overcome its overwhelming poverty and that independence would be prevented by integrating Muslims fully into modern French society. Attainment of these goals, the government argued, required rapid, large-scale social and moral modernization of Algeria’s non-European majority. The means of achieving this modernization was basic education; the vehicle for it was the Service des Centres Sociaux en Algérie. The story of the Centres Sociaux is thus historically significant because it represents the last institutional attempt by the French government to preserve Franco-Muslim solidarity in Algeria.

Yet, even before the Service des Centres Sociaux was officially created in 1955, Algerian and French intellectuals (including Mouloud Feraoun) in Algeria were concerned with the problems of basic education. In January 1951 the Comité Algérien pour l’Éducation de Base, in existence since the end of World War II (and of which Feraoun was a member), issued an “appel” to sensitize the public to the need for educational reform. “In the middle of the twentieth century,” the committee declared, “three quarters of the Algerian population lives practically on the margin of social progress. No honest man can accept or excuse the maintenance of a situation which compromises, unquestionably, the future and the unity of the country.”6 Besides advocating educational reform, which would touch all Algerians, the committee argued that combating “ignorance” entailed general social reforms ranging from hygiene to the “extension of democratic methods to administration.”

When the war broke out in Algeria, the French metropolitan government understood immediately the role educational reform could play in appeasing the Algerian population. But the Centres Sociaux was really the brainchild of Jacques Soustelle. After all, the newly appointed governor general had things on his mind other than sparring with French intellectuals over the right to call himself an intellectual. Soustelle had two primary objectives when he arrived in Algiers in February 1955: pacifying the Algerian rebels and reforming the socio-political administration. Believing that these two goals were mutually dependent, Soustelle realized that he needed the support of Algeria’s French and, perhaps more crucial, that of the Muslims—especially Muslim youth. Winning the Algerian masses’ patronage required a mechanism capable of ensuring cooperation between the two populations. The most powerful mechanism available to Soustelle—other than the military, which he was deploying—was education.

Soustelle explained before the Algerian Assembly on February 23, 1955, why educating Algeria’s Muslims was so important.7 Because Algeria represented the “door” to Africa, he stated, “the time has passed when we can hope to make the happiness of a population paternally without its undertaking the task itself. That is to say, that there is immense educational effort necessary for us in order to get rid of ignorance and indifference, sisters of poverty and inspirations of despair” (3). Above all, the youth represented the hope of Algeria: “Think above all of the youth. Algeria is one of the youngest countries in the world. It would be unpardonable to let this youth slip far away from us. It is for the youth that we must first work and open the doors of hope” (4). This hope would be the expression of a “common culture” and find its application in Soustelle’s policy of “integration.”

In order to tap the richness of the Algerian youth and ensure this common culture, France had to combat the principal obstacle to progress in Algeria: terrorism.8 If existence precedes essence in the existentialist credo, then pacification preceded progress in the Soustellian one. The terrorists, he argued, were those following the command of the exterior, and in order to counter terrorism the French had to take the next step, which was to pacify Algeria: “pacification must be the first duty” of the French.9 Attacking “foreign agents” who “only work for themselves and for their masters and not for Algeria” required a sense of unity among the two Algerian populations.10 Creating a sense of unity within Algeria capable of fending off the foreign threat necessitated isolating all attacks against the French state and French civilians, as well as against Muslims, Kabyles, and other non-European groups. Isolating, unifying, and pacifying the Algerian population meant confronting the “human” and not merely the “political” problems in Algeria. “Aspiring to human dignity is a powerful force; it is in the very heart of all democracies. Social solidarity, mutual respect, letting go of quarrels and discriminations, these are the principles that should guide our action.”11

Although Soustelle had been envisaging a program of systemic reform in Algeria, his inspiration for a specific plan of educational reform did not take concrete form until the arrival of a former colleague, Germaine Tillion. Soustelle’s turning to Tillion for help was no coincidence.12 In early 1955, as a professor of sociology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Tillion had been sent by the French government to Algeria as part of a “scientific mission” to investigate reports of French abuses relating to the war.13 Immediately struck by the level of poverty and the seriousness of the demographic problem, she asked herself what were the best means of struggling against Algeria’s overwhelming poverty. This poverty, she reported, was “worse than it was fifteen years ago.”14 And combating it required an overarching attempt to modernize Algeria’s rural economy through general education and modern agricultural techniques. It also required educating the female population in order to avoid the “brutal techniques” of demographic control known to China.15 But the Centres Sociaux made it clear that Islam was not responsible for the demographic situation.16

During a stop in Algiers, Tillion met with Soustelle. Attentive to her concerns and agreeing that monumental reforms were necessary, he asked Tillion to join his cabinet and work on a plan for an immense educational reform that would stabilize cooperation between the French and non-European populations. In a letter to her friend Louis Massignon, she stated that she believed in the “efficacy and the complete good faith of the governor.”17 Soon after, Tillion agreed to help Soustelle create an educational reform team in Algeria.

Despite Soustelle’s good faith, Tillion was already aware of the resistance reform would encounter from the local French administration and that the French police routinely tortured Muslims in Algeria.18 She was rightly afraid of how this would affect the employees of the Centres Sociaux. Moreover, she sensed that the divisions among the local existing powers, the police, and the French national administration might grow larger as the war continued, and that the Centres Sociaux could become a serious trouble spot where these competing powers overlapped.

Tillion chose Charles Aguesse to lead the campaign of “modernization.” Aguesse, an agrégé in history, was a liberal and a profound humanist; he had since 1945 been director (principal inspector) for the Centers of Popular Education and for the Youth Movements and Popular Education in Algeria’s three departments.19 Aguesse’s principal aide, Isabelle Deblé, had also arrived in Algeria as an educator after liberation and had been a prime mover in the development of women’s organizations. According to Deblé, Aguesse had long been interested in engaging elite French and Algerian intellectuals such as Albert Camus, Emmanuel Roblès, Mohammed Dib, and others in a project that would foster a fraternal spirit in Algeria.20

On October 27, 1955, with a staff chosen and a structure in place, Sou-stelle issued the administrative decree officially recognizing the Centres Sociaux.21 The decree announced that Charles Aguesse would act as the director of the Service des Centres Sociaux and formally connected the Centres Sociaux to the Ministry of National Education in Paris. This was politically important because it meant that the Centres would be under metropolitan control; it was fiscally important because the finances came directly from the budget for French national education. However, the rector of the University of Algiers would be in control of the Centres’ administrative supervision. According to Tillion—who returned to Paris at the end of 1955—it was necessary to connect the Service des Centres Sociaux to the Ministry of National Education in Paris because this offered the smallest chance of being overtly caught up in the politics of decolonization. From the Third Republic on, the ministry had been inspired by a liberal philosophy at the center of which was the respect for the individual.22

Structure and Strategies of the Centres Sociaux

The Service des Centres Sociaux was controlled by the director (Aguesse), the adjunct inspector (Deblé), and several assistants. It was further divided into the Planning Office, which dealt with construction, recruitment, and equipment; the Center of Basic Education, which concentrated on the teaching of personnel, documentation, and pedagogical research; the Administrative Office, which controlled budgets, courses, and mailing; and the Regional Inspection Office, which was charged with public relations, regional statistics, and administrative inspections. The general director of national education in Algeria and the representatives of the Service des Centres Sociaux met to discuss general educational and pedagogical problems.

The Service defined “humility,” “useful character,” and “concern with self-education” as the three principal characteristics of a Centre Social.23 These were reflected in the ideal attributes of modern Algerians: “reading (a little), writing (a little)”—enough to help Algerians regulate their private affairs, dress themselves, and “defend themselves in everyday life.” The Service’s utilitarian character attempted to assure the “adaptation” of the Algerians to the administrative place occupied by “today’s man,” a place from which one could hope to ameliorate one’s condition through “access to work.” Self-education quite simply signaled the desire to help Algerians “help themselves” through the evolution inherent in education. The Centres Sociaux’s tasks were divided into four areas: elementary education (for boys and girls who were not in primary school), basic education (for men and women), economic services (meant to increase individual and family resources), and finally, medical attention (intended to provide medical and pharmaceutical supplies to those in need).24

Despite their official capacity as an organization funded by the French state, from the very beginning the Centres Sociaux claimed specifically to be outside wartime politics and propaganda: “It situates its action on the human plane, without being tied to the political preoccupations of the day and refuses to play the game of propaganda.”25 Regardless of its desire to eschew the politics of “propaganda,” the Service did have its own liberal, humanitarian agenda that guided its social and educational philosophy. Above all, the Service’s primary task was to affect the consciousness of Algerians. In a Cartesian manner, the Centre was supposed to act as a “human intermediary” between the collectivity and the institution and serve as a “living example of a social solidarity without divisions.”26 It would “regroup the individuals who have been separated by social life before being given the means to assure the qualities that make them human” (25). In order to help Algerians become conscious of their own value as humans, society would have to cease to view the isolated individuals merely in terms of economic functions: as workers, “planters,” and so on. Struggling against illiteracy was more than teaching the student how to read the phrase “ ‘Ali goes to school.’ ” To really fulfill his or her functions, the basic education instructor had to help the Algerian “become conscious of his own human condition, to help him ‘play his role and to assume his responsibilities in the heart of the group recognized by him and with which he feels himself solidarity.’ Human dignity is founded on becoming conscious [la prise de conscience]”(25). The Centres Sociaux were to be the principal agents in the individual’s self-recognition of his or her individual worth, and the leadership naively believed that this Cartesian call to consciousness would not be seen as political during the era of decolonization.

Concerns for decolonization aside, this method of education stressed the necessity of working closely with the preexisting system of French pri- mary education. It was hoped that this could help overcome the “gulf” separating the privileged few who had benefited from primary education and the “masses” who had not.27 But to work, the Centres Sociaux would have to identify the most gifted young students and assure that they continued their education in the tradition of the French primary schools. Thus the Service desired to avoid replicating in Algerian society the divisions existing between French and Algerians. To this end, the Service needed to work at “creating the elite without separating them from their milieu of origin, without creating, by consequence, that rupture which generates the psychological and social conflicts that already exist among the diverse elements of Algerian society” (7). In this sense, the Service’s efforts to create a Gramscian organic elite resorted to an educational philosophy targeted specifically at Algerian culture, which underlined the connection between the collective and the individual.

Pursuing this course of action, the Service was less concerned with spreading republicanism than with the modernization of everyday life in Algeria. Hence, the metropolitan government’s interest in integrating Muslims into French political life was slightly out of line with the Service’s primary interests in Algeria. This was not very perceptible as long as the French government’s central concern was to educate Algeria’s underprivileged sector. In other words, while self-sufficiency was the objective of both the metropolitan government and the Service, there was little friction between the government and the educators in Algeria. Most Service educators remained in accord here because they believed that self-sufficiency implied in the “struggle against illiteracy” should be the central concern for the Centres Sociaux.28 But there was a difference when it came to the apolitical spirit of the Service. Its members warned of the subtle political manipulation involved in the fight against illiteracy: “The basic education teacher should not see in the teaching of reading a means to form the intellect and to cultivate the mind—a shameful synonym of instruction” (9). In contrast to the Third Republic’s use of education as a cover for civic lessons, the Centres Sociaux emphasized a nonpolitical struggle against illiteracy. Reading was reading, and there was no room for reading between the lines when a people’s future was at stake.

Ironically, the militant but apolitical engagement that stressed the virtues of organic solidarity placed Aguesse and his coeducators in the center of the Algerian drama. As an “internal” agent of change in Algerian society, Centres Sociaux members were to take a phenomenological leap into the Algerians’ world. Placing oneself within the drama would allow the misery and ailments of society to become part of one’s own identity. This identity found expression in efforts to escape poverty. It also united everyone into a single society, and through this, it created a common identity. As a result, those working in the Centres Sociaux were asked to place themselves in a dangerous no man’s land in the battle for Algeria.

Let the Politics Begin

While the Centres Sociaux attempted to wage social war against the common poverty of Algeria’s underprivileged, the real war between the French nation and the Algerian rebels intensified. Just over one month after Robert Lacoste was named resident minister of Algeria, thus replacing Jacques Soustelle as governor general, the National Assembly, on March 12, 1956, voted for the Special Powers Act. As a result, the French government and military in Algeria would have greater flexibility to quash the rebellion. On January 7, 1957, General Jacques Massu was given full police power by Lacoste to destroy the terrorist networks in Algeria. The infamous Battle of Algiers ensued. By this time, the gap separating the French and Algerian communities had become as formidable as the pressures placed on the Centres to mend divisions. As one of the few institutions capable of demonstrating an ongoing cooperation between the French and Algerians, the Service des Centres Sociaux and its staff continued its attempts to instill a spirit of trust among those it sought to aid. Because of their intense and close relationship with the Algerian population, especially in a climate where existing paths of mutual comprehension between the two communities had been polarized by violence, the Centres Sociaux became suspect. In short, although committed to reform, they were gradually seen by extremists more as mechanisms enhancing the revolutionary move to independence than as a means to solidify France’s presence in Algeria.

From October 1955 to 1957, with the exception of one incident where a woman of Swiss origin working for the Service was arrested for allegedly helping Algerian “rebels,” personnel had few problems with the French police and military in Algeria. The first major scandal occurred in the heat of the Battle of Algiers in 1957. The Centres Sociaux, and consequently the last official attempts by the French government to breathe life into the utopian ideal of a Franco-Muslim community, would never fully recover.

On March 22, 1957, just after Lacoste announced that Larbi Ben M’hidi—one of the nine original FLN leaders who had been arrested on February 25—had supposedly “hanged” himself in his Algiers jail cell (though he had been fastened to his bed so he could not escape), the ultra-backed Algeria daily L’Écho d’Alger published an article alleging that members of the Centres Sociaux could be connected to anti-French acts of terrorism. Specifically, two people were accused of aiding in the flight of a bombing suspect and one of distributing the FLN publication El Moudjahid. The fugitive the two Centres employees helped to escape was Raymonde Peschard, a suspect in the infamous bombing of the Milk Bar at Place d’Isly in September 1957 and the bombing of a bus in the working class city of Diar-es-Saada. Three Centres Sociaux employees were captured in another dragnet effort by the police. Through a series of unrelated arrests, there were increasing accusations that a significant number of French and Algerian civilians posed threats to French national security. Thirty-five French and Algerians (several of them employees in the Centres Sociaux) were grouped together and accused of conspiring with the FLN. Because of their national and religious origins, the group of thirty-five were dubbed “progressivists” and/or “liberals” by the press. In all, two priests, members of two religious communities, and several civil servants and members of the Centres Sociaux were charged with various crimes against the French state. The accused were not acting in a unified manner, but the French-Algerian press opined about the danger they posed.29

Even the metropolitan press decried these dangers. On March 26, Le Figaro ran the headline “By Friendship, Imprudence, or Passion: The Progressive Christians came to aid and hide terrorists.”30 According to Serge Bromberger, a correspondent for Le Figaro in Algeria, it appeared clear that the “progressivists” had acted on their own behalf and were effectively toys of the FLN. As a result of their exceptionally close contact with the Algerians, their crimes had been inspired by misdirected and overzealous sympathy. Their contact was based on the directives of a superior authority such as the PCF. Yet if the progressivists acted out of personal motivation derived from naive friendships with the rebels, as the press claimed, the same could not be said for those working for the FLN. Among the accused were several notable cases where friendship between French and Algerian nationalists had left the French deceived and betrayed.

Once the Service des Centres Sociaux was dragged into the political arena of decolonization against its will, it was never able to extricate itself from the infernal logic of wartime politics. Seen as a source of anti-French activity by the ultras, but conscious that they alone could help prepare Algerians for a better life through economic and social modernization, the members of the Centres Sociaux waged an unsuccessful campaign in Algeria. One of the most damning indictments of the French settlers (especially the ultras) was their resistance to the French educational campaigns of the Centres Sociaux. Perhaps the ultras feared the Centres’ goals of helping the Algerians to become aware of their individual worth. Regardless of the reasons, instead of seeing the Centres as a social instrument for continued cooperation between the French and Muslim populations in Algeria, the ultras’ paranoia prevented them from understanding how the Algerians would become more open to the French if they were given real economic and social opportunities.

The Progressivist Trial

It is difficult to prove that one act of violence was the culmination of years of fear and distrust. However, it is important to understand why the ultras represented the Centres Sociaux—an organization intended to preserve French interests and connected to the French national education system— as a threat to the future of French Algeria. For this, we must give close attention to several cases that led the French ultras to believe that the Centres Sociaux members were being coerced by the Algerian rebels. The friendship between a Frenchwoman, an assistant at the Centre Social of Maison-Carrée, and Chafika Meslem, a Muslim Centre director, exemplified the ultras’ argument.31 The Frenchwoman and Meslem were arrested for helping a suspected “Communist” terrorist, Raymonde Peschard (known to the press as “Mlle Louise”), flee from Algiers police. The two had helped Peschard avoid arrest by hiding her in the convent of the Soeurs Blanches in Algiers.

The case of the Frenchwoman and Meslem presented the ultras with a perfect occasion to exploit the supposedly diabolical character of Muslims engaged in the revolution. The ultras were able to attack efforts at dialogue between the two communities on the grounds that the French educators (and consequently France) were betrayed through their friendships with Muslims. Also, according to Bromberger, Meslem, a Muslim, had deliberately acted as a “liaison between the progressive Christians in order to get the maximum amount of ‘efficacious’ complicity” from them. “Those friendships,” the Figaro correspondent continued, “made at the desk and in intellectual circles, were meant to yield results.” It was thus the totalitarian nature of the FLN that “coldly exploited this unexpected seam where the emotional connections have created in them [the French] the very French instinct to take a priori the side of the fugitive against the police.” Naturally, Bromberger continued, “[t]his instinct also ‘disappears’ after seeing the results of the fugitives’ bomb at the exit of a Prisunic.”32

For the progressivists accused of collusion with the enemy, there were severe consequences. For example, on April 11, 1957, the Frenchwoman working for the Centres Sociaux wrote a formal testimony to “The Prosecutor for the Republic and the General Prosecutor.” Arrested on the night of February 26, she was immediately tortured by the French military. No one asked her identity until March 13, and she was not taken before a judge until April 3. Of the events of the night of her arrest she wrote:

In the torture room, they stripped off all my clothes. They tied my feet to my hands, slapped me, acted as if they were going to strangle me to death; after these preliminaries, they laid me out on something like a ladder placed horizontally on a little water basin where my hands were soaking. Then they put a water pipe in my mouth and, as they pinched my nose, they forced me to drink until my body was completely distended. They “helped” me vomit the water by pressing on my stomach. Then they attached the electrodes to the different parts of my body, concentrating on my breast, my abdomen, and my mouth. They then started again with the water until I began to black out.33

After these tortures, she was tossed in a cell and left without food or water for three days. But, as she indicates in the letter, her treatment was not nearly as bad as that of the other women she saw who were “disfigured.”

From behind the bars of Barbarouse in the next few months, until the progressivists’ trial began on July 23, the Frenchwoman and her attorney gathered character witnesses for her defense. One witness wrote, “I have been a witness of profound human qualities of which she isproof. For a long time, she has given herself the goal of relieving the misery of the Other.”34 Another former colleague wrote:

She ardently desired social justice, without ever becoming a fanatic. She certainly felt a real vocation for social work…. I know that she has made lots of friends in Algiers, French and Muslims, and above all among those working for a Franco-Muslim rapprochement…. [S] he worked with all her heart and intelligence to ameliorate the living conditions of the poorest sections of the population and to create the connections of friendship between the French and Muslim populations.35

On July 17, 1957, just a week before the trial started in Algiers, Charles Aguesse sent a letter attesting to his colleague’s character. After recounting how she had been recruited by the Centres Sociaux on November 15, 1955, Aguesse stated that she was a “colleague of the first order in a service whose mission it was to come to the aid of the most disinherited populations. [She] sacrificed without complaint, brought and represented here the highest qualities that make France loved and nourishes the hope of seeing a true Franco-Muslim community built.”36

As the debates surrounding the trial showed, not everyone shared Aguesse’s sense of grace for those who had committed judgment errors regarding the Franco-Muslim community in Algeria. In the pretrial controversy, Témoignage chrétien published a highly provocative text concerning the progressivists and the Muslim community by an anonymous French priest.37 The editors at Témoignage chrétien introduced the text by saying that they had waited two months, deciding to publish the text only after it first appeared in D’Alger Université, a European student newspaper at the University of Algiers. In the text, the priest argued that the Muslim fighters, the fellagha, as he called them, attempted to disguise their horrible crimes under the pretense of being “authentic fighters for liberty and justice.” According to the priest, the rebels were nothing other than a “gang” that “killed, mutilated, terrorized women, the aged, and children, whether they were European or Muslim” and which could only be dealt with by eradicating them completely.

The error the French government was making with this trial, the priest continued, was to treat the “gang” within the framework of the judicial system. Since they employed inhuman tactics, they did not deserve to be treated according to the rule of civil society. In his words, “For civilized people, the Penal Code; for the uncivilized people [peuples primitifs], the Penal Code of the uncivilized.” The priest admitted that the so-called Catholic progressivists would find his comments harsh, but insisted that he was merely following God’s rules for dealing with the uncivilized. “Exodus 21:12,” he wrote, said all that was necessary here: “When someone strikes another and causes his death, let him be put to death,” and 21:1, “If someone assassinates the neighbor, you bring him to my chair so he will be put to death.” For the Christians who hid the guilty in Algeria, the priest argued, it was necessary to reflect on these passages to distinguish between “charity” and “complicity.”

It was within this mind frame that the progressivists went to trial in the summer of 1957. The metropolitan and Algerian presses covered the event with great care. The trial merits consideration here not only because of the Centres members’ involvement, but also because the thirty-five progressivists were tried together, despite the fact that many of their crimes were unrelated. Furthermore, it was a sensational trial because, for the first time during the war, a large cluster of Muslims and Europeans went to the stand together as alleged criminals. In covering the trial, even Le Monde’s reporter Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, remarked on the uncanny “Frenchness” of the accused Muslims. He wrote that in “remarkable French” they expressed their belief in the “political action” of the FLN but “ ‘deplored all violence wherever it [led].’ ” According to this portrait, the accused progressivists did not celebrate violence. “ ‘I deplore all innocent victims,’ declared Chafika,” Le Monde reported. The reporter went on to write that Meslem was “very Europeanized” and that her personality, “dominated the trial.”38

On July 25 Poirot-Delpech reported the results and noted the predictions of Mercier (the lawyer for Meslem and the Frenchwoman) that the “Franco-Muslim” friendship forged by them would have lasting, positive effects in Algeria: “When the fire has gone out, the work of these two friends will stay. It is our luck to see them together. Do not separate them. The rebellion is atrocious. Repression is atrocious. We cannot humanize evil. Refuse to see a crime in the trust born in the middle of an infernal cycle.”39 They were separated. Meslem, regarded by the press as the important contact point for the FLN, was sentenced to five years in prison with the possibility of parole. The Frenchwoman working for the Centres was acquitted and soon after returned to France.

The rest of the verdicts were reported without ceremony, though Poirot-Delpech did acknowledge that the “Muslims were much harder hit than the Europeans.” Only one European, Pierre Coudre, a former Resistance hero and a Centre Social director, had been condemned without the possibility of parole. This was because he “affirmed his approval of the political goals of his Muslim friends.”

Ironically, in February 1957, Coudre had been congratulated for his efforts in the Centres Sociaux by Mollet’s minister of social affairs. Coudre’s punishment was more severe because his was not merely a case of manipulation by the FLN. He and Denise Walbert, a former leader of the Muslim Scouts and a social assistant in juvenile delinquency education, had also been in contact with Meslem. According to the press, because of their relation with Meslem—who had encouraged their sympathies for the rebellion—they had decided to distribute copies of El Moudjahid. Walbert received a five-year term with parole, and Coudre—despite former minister Edmond Michelet’s testimony on his behalf—a two-year term.40

As reported in the French metropolitan press, the most insidious aspect of the trial was the revelation of how Muslims could manipulate good, honest Christian sentiments to further terrorism. It was understandable, then, that in concluding coverage of the trial Le Monde also noted that the events of the trials had sparked heated debates within the Christian community in Algeria. Le Monde was not alone its assessment of the trial’s effects. For example, Le Figaro’s Serge Bromberger reported his concern for the “duping” of the Christian community by the Muslim-backed FLN: “It is possible for the mind to conceive that in Algeria Muslims are nationalists. It can even conceive, with difficulty, that a European can have sympathies for an Algerian nationalist movement, even directed against his own country. But that which the mind refuses is that a European can be a Muslim nationalist and belong to the FLN. Now, this is what springs from the behavior of Madame Walbert and from Pierre Coudre.”41 The other Europeans involved in the trial, according to the reporter, were “dupes” whose “noble sentiments” were “exploited” by fanatical Muslims.

Besides the problems confronting the Centres’ members, there were more salient cases of the “exploitation of the feelings of Christian charity” by Algerians. Abbé Barthez from the Mission of France was the most notable example among the progressivists. Found guilty of hiding a printing press in his church hall, he stated that he had been “struck” by the “existing gap” between the French and the Muslims. Thus he had decided to work for a “Franco-Muslim rapprochement” by harboring a printing press for Algerians. He was sentenced to five months in prison with possibility of parole.

Not surprisingly, the collective trial—aided by hysterical media coverage—permeated French society in Algeria and called into question the patriotism of those who worked most closely with the Muslims, especially the educators working for the Centres Sociaux. The trial also gave all sides the first real glimpse of how costly the politics of rapprochement could be. Were the Centres Sociaux working in the interest of the French in Algeria or were they too easily coerced by the rebellion, as the ultras claimed? One Algerian daily, Dernière heure, responded thus: “[P]rogressivists” are “partisans of a materialist doctrine, naturalists, and rationalists, consequently directed toward communism…. The liberals are a creation which corresponds to the logical Cartesian need—which one attributes—often wrongly—to the French. They are situated between the ‘ultras’ and the leftist extremists.”42

On July 30, in response to these and other like-minded newspapers, the archbishop of Algiers, Léon-Etienne Duval, released a declaration published in Témoignage chrétien and L’Écho d’Alger, claiming that to connect the so-called Christian progressivists with the Communist materialist doctrine was foolish.43 Because the current period in Algeria was troubled, wrote the archbishop, one should, despite the imprudence committed by those tried, respect the “conscience of the accused.”44 According to Duval, this respect for individual conscience was fundamental to a sincere cooperation between “Algeria’s two spiritual families.” On August 2, L’Écho d’Alger took a more critical approach when it published an editorial comment on the trial, saying that a foundation of respect was necessary for the coexistence of the two spiritual communities, but that it would have been “good politics” for the accused to have tried to develop this respect with people other than “Muslim killers and executioners.”45“More than ever,” the editorial continued, “collaboration” was necessary but this time with “clear-seeing people.”

Edmond Michelet, who had come to the defense of his friend Pierre Coudre, published his account of the significance of the progressivist trial in an article for Témoignage chrétien titled “The Trial of the Christians in Algeria.”46 He applauded the fact that “despite differences in race, language, and religions” there were individuals committed to the “establishment of a fraternal human community” in Algeria. And even before the trial began in July, Jean Gonnet, director of L’Espoir-Algérie, published an article in Le Monde defending members of the Centres Sociaux.47 One could not deny, he wrote, that because of their direct contacts with “little Muslim people,” those accused, the social workers, “the functionaries in the Centres Sociaux, teachers, and little supervisors” knew “better than anyone… the sufferings of the inhabitants… caught between the crossfire of repression and pacification.” Gonnet went on to claim that the so-called liberals were those who took great risks in order to keep the dialogue open and “refused to betray their friendships.” “Tossing in jail” those who tried to keep the friendships and the Franco-Muslim community alive, “those who really believe in them, is to avow to oneself that one no longer believes [in friendships or the Franco-Muslim community].”

It is clear from the trials that the Service des Centres Sociaux had been pulled into the antagonistic climate that, with the escalation of terrorism and torture in Algeria, rendered everyday cooperation between the two communities nearly impossible and at best suspect. But in 1957 this was not unique to the Centres; it was especially true for the Muslim population at large. One of the Centres’ victims at El Biar, Mouloud Feraoun, commented on the junglelike atmosphere in Algiers in August 1957:

You get the impression that you are living in an organized society. There are two clans: the police and the suspects. The military police station themselves at every intersection to check on suspects. They walk along the major roads to keep an eye on suspects. They position themselves at entrances of buildings and in front of public transport in order to frisk suspects. Armed and powerful, the police inspire great fear in the suspects.48

Unquestionably, given these clanlike conditions, where every Muslim was a suspect in the eyes of the French authorities, intellectuals and educators working for the Centres Sociaux faced an incredible dilemma. They could retreat from the Algerian Muslim population in order to protect themselves against the radicalizing colons in Algeria, or they could move forward with the Franco-Muslim reconciliation and thereby risk being seen by Algerian nationalists as working for French colonial and settler interests. Regardless of the new blemishes on the body of the Centres, Charles Aguesse continued his policy of rapprochement.49 In an editorial in the January-February 1958 edition of their publication, Aguesse praised the Centres for building twenty-five functioning centers, with eleven newly opened and another nine scheduled to open by the end of 1958.50 Rather than stepping away from the local population or trying to move too fast to gain the confidence of the Algerians, he argued that they needed to continue their laborious efforts of making contact. “Everywhere, but particularly in Algeria, confidence demands time (often years) and preliminary and frequent contact. Does the team of the Centres Sociaux not respond better to this criteria since its goal is, above all, to establish contact, to create confidence?”51

While Aguesse had argued that more time was necessary to win the confidence of the local population, Paris wanted immediate results. New pressures fell on the Centres Sociaux. Faced with an explosive anticolonial war, the French Ministry of National Education decided to quicken the growth of the Centres Sociaux. But there were conflicting opinions on just how fast educational reform should proceed. For example, the French government did not understand that trust between educator and educated would have to be built before reforms could be implemented. “ ‘There is nothing urgent,’ ” Aguesse wrote, humorlessly recounting an old man’s conversation with him, “ ‘there are only things done too late.’ That is too true; but urgent or late, we cannot toss up programs in a few days, we cannot invent qualified personnel in a few weeks.”52 The ultimate danger in creating “superficial” members who lacked the true vocation of helping the Algerians would be that they could not be counted on to stay. If educators left after raising the Algerians’ hopes, they would essentially betray the spirit of cooperation.

The Centres were also under heavy pressure to cooperate with the police. On March 19, 1958, Aguesse sent a “note” to the inspectors and directors of the Centres outlining a new academic status. This status required that all future nominations of instructors receive approval from the rector and that the director of each Centre be required to give descriptions of the Centre’s activities to both the local authorities (police and military) and the rector.

May 1958 and Its Impact on the Centres Sociaux

As further reforms were being envisaged for the Centres, the largest governmental crisis of the war emerged. The Gaillard government fell on April 15. On May 6, Pierre Pflimlin was mentioned as a possible successor, but his nomination rested on the Independents, and they were too undecided. On May 13, three French prisoners of the FLN were killed in retaliation for the guillotining of two Algerians convicted of terrorism. In response, an enormous crowd of French civilians descended on the government headquarters in Algiers to stage a coup d’état. For the first time since the outbreak of the war, the French government in Paris faced total anarchy as the ultras began to cut contact between France and Algiers. As Simone de Beauvoir put it: “Algeria was cutting itself off from France to remain French.”53 Lacoste, understanding that his administration was in trouble, had already headed quietly out of Algiers and back to Paris. With the Communists abstaining, Pflimlin was quickly voted in by the Chamber of Deputies. Pflimlin, seeing that he would have to act quickly if he wanted to counter the subversive movement, ordered the arrest of several extreme right-wing leaders in Algeria and placed Jacques Soustelle under police surveillance in Paris.54 In order to get a better hold of leadership in Algiers, the French military and ultras created a Committee of Public Safety. Generals Jacques Massu and Raoul Salan assured Paris that the committee was necessary only to keep the situation in Algiers from becoming a civil war. Finally, on May 13, Salan and Massu lent the army’s support to the Committee of Public Safety.

With Paris directly threatened by the military in Algeria, de Gaulle answered the call and agreed to take power, despite the massive protests of the Communists, Socialists, and radicals against the military’s attack on the Fourth Republic. On June 1, the helpless Parliament—facing an attack by its own military that had just landed in Corsica and was threatening to take over Paris—accepted de Gaulle as the new French president. Given the power to rule by decree for the first months, de Gaulle offered a new constitution for the Fifth Republic in September. It is generally accepted among historians that the transition to a military order was initiated by Socialist Robert Lacoste, when he signed over full police powers to the military in January 1957.55

When the Committee of Public Safety arranged its coup, the Service des Centres Sociaux was again suspected of potential subversion. The committee wrote a form letter on May 30 to Centres personnel, indicating the adoption of the following motion:

As for what concerns the Centres Sociaux, created by jacques soustelle in order to aid in the evolution of the Muslim population in Algeria and to ameliorate the quality of life through elementary education, collective and global, the Committee of Public Safety of National Education recognizes in these elements the most pressing task that, in the spirit of May 13, takes the figure of a veritable national obligation.

Considering that millions of beings for whom we should accelerate evolution are the sons that France gathered at her breasts, it follows that the Centres Sociaux should resolutely orient their action in the sense of a rapid and total integration of all the Algerian populations into the French nation.

We would be happy that you make known this position expressed by the C.S.P. of National Education concerning the role of these elements…. It is evident that the future of the Centres Sociaux will depend on the personnel’s awareness of the mission that it must fulfill in the framework of French Algeria; that is to say that your response is important (which is asked of you in confidentiality). For the same reason, we will interpret your silence as disapproval.56

On June 1, 1958, the day of de Gaulle’s investiture, the National Education branch of the Committee of Public Safety wrote another letter, addressed “Cher amis,” to the sectional divisions in Algeria. Signed by the same Centres Sociaux inspector, Mr. Fourestier, the letter demonstrates that some of Aguesse’s own employees opposed his apolitical stance. According to the committee, if the Centres had a bad reputation it was due to the presence of “anti-French elements” within. To find out who was subversive, members were asked to sign a political statement attesting their allegiance to the new regime. In the “interest even of the population who benefits from the Centres,” the committee wrote, members must pronounce their views on “their mission in the new Algeria, [the one] born of the national turnaround of May 13.”57

Disgusted by this intrusion in its educational affairs, the Service des Centres Sociaux sent a letter to the rector of the University of Algiers. What disturbed them most was that the need for a public commitment to the mission in the new Algeria “was presented … under the organic activity of their [own] service.”58 Rebuffing the demands of allegiance to May 13, they informed the rector that the educators within the Centres had always struggled for the “evolution of the Muslim population and the amelioration of the quality of life.” They reemphasized the apolitical nature of the Service des Centres Sociaux and consequently did “not see how the politics of integration [could] modify their action, their educational techniques, or their means of action.” Equally important, they regretted that the Committee of Public Safety was threatening them by claiming that the Centres’ “future” depended on the responses.59

After the chaos of May 1958, it took a few months before the real educational issues of the Centres Sociaux could be addressed. On August 18, 1958, the rector issued a statement that changed the orientation of the Centres by tightening their relations with other local authorities (the military and the police). The Service was to continue building a “bridge” between itself and the Muslim population.60 But the Centres’ plan for creating this bridge needed to be incorporated within a larger framework of all the different aspects of civil and military administration, including the SAS. In clarifying the relationship between the Centres and other branches of the administration, the rector congratulated the Centres for their work and for their “spirit of political and religious neutrality” (3).

In August 1958 de Gaulle’s newly formed government began to consider the issue of public education in Algeria. On August 20 de Gaulle signed into effect an ordinance that announced the dramatic acceleration of “schooling” (scolarisation) in Algeria with an eight-year plan to increase the pace and numbers of those to be educated. This was supposed to be a clear sign to Muslims and Europeans in Algeria that de Gaulle’s government intended to stay there. The schooling program, like the Centres, was something new to French education in Algeria, and it meant something specific within the Algerian context. Since the non-European population historically had been neglected—“untouched” as the French said—by French education, it was necessary to prepare the students before they could receive formal training in the normal French primary school system.

The schooling plan essentially changed the scope of the Centres. The educators were now to focus on scholastic performance and no longer on social issues. The goal of preparing an estimated 1,200,000 Algerian students for the normal French education system called for an ambitious construction of a total of 705 Centres by 1966.61 There was a projected additional need of 1,800 new positions for educators to deal with the enormous increase in the number of students. The Centres, under this new ordinance, were to be redesigned to identify and upgrade talented Algerian students as quickly as possible with the aim of placing them in the normal French educational system, beginning with primary school.

Two motives become apparent when one looks at the change for the Centres. The most obvious is that the French government, at least publicly, was investing in long-term reform and planning its future in Algeria. It is clear, from this perspective, that the French state intended to remain in Algeria and that it considered the production of more traditional and nontraditional educational centers a key element in this equation. The second but less obvious motive relates to what type of society the French authorities hoped to create in this dramatic reform. This is best highlighted by the commentary on the plan by Jean Berthoin, de Gaulle’s minister of national education:

One can say without forcing the words that the present ordinance marks a decisive date, an historic date for the future of Algeria, from an economic point of view, as well as from a social and cultural one. But our Algeria merits such an effort from metropolitan France— it merits it by the intelligence of its sons, so avid to learn, so apt to instruct themselves from the moment that means are given to them. It needs them in order to release all the elements of activity and training necessary for its development on the human level. Thus, its original role, born of the meeting on her soil of two civilizations, will be affirmed and confirmed and will finally make them one within the French ensemble.62

The French were investing in the education of Algerian Muslims not only to improve Algerians’ living standards, but also to ensure that French and Algeria would remain “one.” In a word, education would do to the Algerians what it had done to the French: mediate cultural differences and foster loyalty to the French national community. Education from this perspective could retard or stop decolonization in Algeria and generate political loyalty among the Algerian masses.

It had been clear from the beginning that the French placed a premium on modernization and that modernization efforts revealed both respect for and fear of local Muslim customs. Following the August 20 ordinance, the rector, Laurent Capdecomme, wrote a brief study in which he claimed that “In respecting the customs and religions [in Algeria], France is charged with furnishing the entire population its language and its culture in order to permit access to the knowledge necessary for modern life.”63 Moreover, especially concerning the ordinance, the rector wrote that the reforms would be “socially” important but would also give Algeria “a framework indispensable to economic and social promotion, which is the integral guarantee of stability and peace” (6). In other words, if these reforms worked, Algerians could hope for a brighter future because in accepting them they would be accepting an unquestionably French modernity.64

The Service des Centres Sociaux

Éducatifs: A New Leader and a New Name

On July 7, 1959, Charles Aguesse stepped down as director of the Service des Centres Sociaux. The French officials had asked for his resignation for several reasons. Perhaps the most important relates to the change of emphasis for the Centres Sociaux. The social and adult educational aspects (such as domestic, hygienic, and technical education) were increasingly being replaced with standard academic programs. In the French republican system, academic schooling had everything to do with politics, for it implied creating an allegiance between students and republican values. Aguesse criticized this shift because it diverted energy away from the more pressing social needs of preparing Algerians, both young and old, for immediate social and economic modernization. It was clear that on this basis alone Aguesse would have to go. But there were equally pressing reasons for his dismissal. The French metropolitan government was particularly dissatisfied with his handling of the Centres’ political affairs. As the progressivist trials had shown, Aguesse did not have the political acuity (if anyone could have) to deflect the overwhelming political hostility of the ultras in Algeria. Despite his good intentions and his liberal, humanitarian efforts, he had proved unable to keep his organization from being touched by scandal. If the Centres were to function well on Algerian soil, they would have to distance themselves from any actions that could be seen as subversive, and Aguesse had done just the opposite as director.

Aguesse’s sudden departure, however, could do nothing to protect the Service des Centres Sociaux from an impending political crisis. Just days after Aguesse resigned and while the directorship of the Centres Sociaux was temporarily transferred to the rector of the University of Algiers, a new scandal riveted the Centres. The principal antagonists, the ultra press, headlined another outbreak of sedition and conspiracy in the Centres. On the day Aguesse flew from Algiers to Paris, L’Écho d’Alger started a series of articles connecting the Centres Sociaux to the FLN.65 Although arrests of Centres members had started in May 1959, the press did not print the information until after Aguesse’s resignation. On July 11 the Algerian newspaper Dépêche quotidienne claimed that the decision to relieve Aguesse and appoint General Dunoyer de Segonzac (whose appointment had been retracted within days) as director came after the police discovered a metropolitan-directed FLN network within the Centres. According to the newspaper, the arrests were the real cause of Aguesse’s resignation.

The new scandal caused more problems for the Centre. The Service counted the apprehension of nineteen of its members on July 27, 1959. This time most were Muslim educators. Only one European figured among the two Centre directors, three adjuncts to the director, thirteen monitors, and one monitor aide arrested. Moreover, despite the de Gaulle government’s claims that torture by police in Algeria had ceased, a handful of the nineteen arrested claimed to have been tortured. By July 2, six had been released, six indicted, and seven remained undetermined.66 The principal charge against the members was that they had been aiding the rebels by illegally providing them with pharmaceutical supplies and medical equipment from the Centres.67

In late July another ultra paper, Sud-Ouest, ran a damaging story against the Centres Sociaux, “The Centres Sociaux of Algiers were infiltrated by the FLN.”68 The two years since the 1957 arrests, the article claimed, had shown “how much Aguesse was ‘maneuvered’ by the element of the FLN.” With a dozen of these members found guilty, Sud-Ouest continued that the police had found the Centres Sociaux was a “real organization aiding the rebellion…. The importance of the Centres Sociaux, their dispersion, their materials, the medication at their disposition, their contacts with the population constitute an important stake for the rebellion. The problem is now to put [them] in order because [their] direction lacks surveillance.”

While the press was engaged in its attacks on the Centres Sociaux, an-other effort was made by Aguesse’s staff to reinstate him as director. Mr. Lepetre, a representative of the Centres Sociaux, went to Paris to meet with Bernard Tricot, de Gaulle’s attaché and principal adviser on Algeria.69 In this meeting, he was presented by the attaché with one dossier compiled by the police, who accused Aguesse of “treason,” and another citing Aguesse’s administrative incapacity.70 Lepetre defended Aguesse, and in response Tricot attacked his administration for not being aware of the events leading up to the recent arrest of the Centres’ members and showed his outrage that the police had discovered these incidents before Aguesse’s own staff had. Lepetre acknowledged that Aguesse had always “ignored these facts,” but argued that after the trial of the progressivists, Aguesse had attempted to take the necessary measures against these types of activities. Lepetre confirmed that medication and medical attention had been given to wounded rebels, an admission that demonstrated that the Centres had not remained entirely apolitical. Lepetre asked Tricot whether the French government had changed its stance on Algeria and insisted that the Centres Sociaux had always been the “third way between the two extremes becoming more and more excessive.” Outraged at the question, Tricot reaffirmed that de Gaulle “desired” the continuation of the “third way.”

In reality, two simultaneous factors were moving against the “third way” philosophy of the Centres Sociaux. The first was the change in academic structure and orientation, which strove to accelerate the pace of “scolarisation” for Algerian children in the Centres. This program, which had come with de Gaulle’s August 20, 1958, ordinance, aligned the Centres Sociaux with the republic’s educational aspirations and downplayed the Algerians’ perceived social needs. The second force acting against Aguesse was the growing and unmitigated hostility of the French ultras, the police, and the military to an organization whose central concern was to make depoliticized contact with the Muslim population. In letters to his second in charge, Isabelle Deblé, Aguesse had long complained of the army’s excessive campaign to control the Centres, and he understood that if the army took such control Algerians would lose what little faith they had left in France.

The Algérie française press wasted no time in attacking Aguesse’s successor, Marcel Lesne. Lesne, who had spent the previous thirteen years as an educator in Morocco, was chosen directly by the rector of the University of Algiers, Capdecomme. After Lesne assumed his position in October 1959, the French newspaper 6 aux Écoutes wrote that the change had not at all “modified the unfortunate tendencies manifested by certain parts” of the Centres Sociaux.71 Other ultra papers could not resist the opportunity to renew their attacks on the Centres. On November 2, L’Écho d’Alger republished the entire 6 aux Écoutes article, which cited a recent case of a Muslim, pro-FLN, “anti-French” member getting advancement within the Centres.72

In part, these attacks arose from the political chaos of de Gaulle’s administration. Just over one year in power, de Gaulle permanently altered the contours of the Algerian debate with his September 16, 1959, “selfdetermination” speech, which indicated that he was moving cautiously toward independence. Not surprisingly, there appear to have been important connections between the politics of self-determination and the increased aid for schooling. By increasing education efforts in Algeria (which implied republican ideals and teachings), the French government may have been trying to secure a future in Algeria, regardless of the outcome of a free election. Just two months before the “self-determination” speech, the minister of national education changed the status and title of the Service des Centres Sociaux d’Algérie to Service des Centres Sociaux Éducatifs en Algérie in his efforts to draw closer parallels between the new goals.

With the change of leadership and name came an expressed belief in democratic values. On October 20, Lesne’s administration published a circular that outlined the tasks confronted by the new leadership. As was the case with Aguesse’s administration, Lesne was charged with accelerating the modernization of the Algerian population. This was no small task because a large part of it lacked “contact, not only with the schools and their discipline, but also with the modes of Western life.” This statement was an unmistakable indication that education in Algeria was taking on increasing political significance and that the Service was to become an agent in preparing Algerian Muslims for the democratic responsibilities of citizenship in the French republican system. Unfortunately, Lesne argued, Aguesse had not understood all his tasks as director:

Without a doubt, and as much as he [Aguesse] had already exercised his functions of Headmaster, he was by nature more prone to the games of ideas than to the ungrateful servitude of organization. He should have realized this himself and asked for an administrative assistant who could have guided him and could have served as his guide and his mentor. To the contrary, he took care to keep his academic administration as independent as possible and encircled himself with imaginative people of his kind, impatient with every reasonable constraint.73

The most damning part of this current tallying of the administrative dis-order facing the new Centres Sociaux Éducatifs, however, came at the level of politics:

Political consequences—It was inevitable, given the period in which we live [decolonization] and thanks to the permanent disorder, that the Service des Centres Sociaux finished by serving as a refuge to some of the rebellion’s accomplices. Employing a large proportion of Muslim personnel, acting uniquely on the Muslim population, practicing in principle more “fraternization” than “paternalization,” the Service des Centres Sociaux should have shown discretion in what concerns the secrets of the heart, which it has as its task to win and not to violate. It does not seem impossible, if the Service succeeded in its mission, that there would be Muslims among its agents with nationalist tendencies who would unknowingly change their mind as they collaborated with French people of a different origin and as they tried to ameliorate the conditions of their brothers. Once again, this is all delicate, difficult, and should be followed very closely by a seasoned manager. It does not have to be that a sympathizing “ameliorator” turns into an accomplice of our enemies. It does not have to be the case that they [our enemies] use the means of the Service for their benefit. It does not have to be the case that, in such a troubled atmosphere, one can assume that they [Centres] are guilty…. It is clear that the project undertaken by the Centres Sociaux has its detractors of different stripes, avid to expose the errors and the mistakes of an organization whose interest they do not understand and to whom it (i.e., the organization) appears dangerous at different levels.74

According to Lesne, Aguesse’s departure had been warranted on the basis of managerial malpractice. From an administrative point of view, Aguesse’s error had been poor control of his own staff and failure to keep abreast of the very real possibilities that his employees could become partisans and not just mere sympathizers of the rebellion. More important, though, were Lesne’s perceptions of the Service and its members becoming active in projecting the virtues of French culture. As Lesne wrote, even the Muslims working for the Centres could be unknowingly converted to the French cause through the process of helping their “brothers” as they collaborated with the French. The project of reform through education, given Lesne’s considerations, would have a doubling effect whereby Muslims working with the French and from within a French system in order to help Algeria’s underprivileged would unconsciously be converted to French values. As a result, educational reform would not lead the Centres into sedition; rather, it could serve as a silent proselytizing structure.

If this was the opinion of the leadership of the Centres, it seems appropriate to ask what the Muslims working for the Centres thought about the role of the Centres in Algeria, especially during decolonization. Perhaps there are no better sources than Ali Hammoutene and Mouloud Feraoun, two of the six men murdered by the OAS at El Biar. Both Feraoun and Hammoutene were educated at the prestigious École Normale d’Alger-Bouzaréah; both were respected educators who came to work for the Centres toward the end of the war in 1960. They left important records of their experiences as educators in Algeria. In particular, Hammoutene’s Réflexions sur la guerre d’Algérie and Feraoun’s Journal, 1955–1962: Reflections on the French-Algerian War and letters collected under the title Lettres à ses amis offer insight into how the Algerians viewed the possibility of a living Franco-Muslim community. Ironically, after Hammoutene (also a Kabyle) was deemed dangerous to French security and ordered to leave Tizi-Ouzou, he moved with his family to the Fougeroux school in Algiers. In 1960 he had great success on his Contours d’Inspecteur exams and was recruited as adjunct director of the Centres Sociaux Éducatifs. Feraoun and Hammoutene, along with the four others assassinated, perhaps best symbolized the last existing bridge for the Franco-Muslim communities. “The Franco-Muslim community cannot have hate and blood as its foundation,” wrote Hammoutene in 1956.75 As for most of the members in the Centres Sociaux, devotion to education inspired these six until the end of the war.

Feraoun understood that the French needed him and others like him to work for the French educational apparatus in Algeria, but he feared that French confidence in him rendered him suspect to his fellow Algerians: “I am maintaining my balance on a very tight, thin rope. This week, for example, I have most likely given the maquis the impression that I am leaning toward the French side.”76 And if he was ambivalent about working for the French in general, he was even more so about the Centres Sociaux in particular. In a letter to Emmanuel Roblès dated April 8, 1961, Feraoun wrote:

At the Centres Sociaux, I do boring work for which I do not give a damn and which will not interest anyone. It is the most sterile blabla-bla, but I also realize that every Academy is bla-bla-bla. The only true work is that of the teacher. All the others, who call themselves the patrons, are in reality only parasites who exist because of him [the teacher] and spend their time pressing him like a lemon.

If there were ever a good book to be written, it would certainly be that; to render justice to the teacher.77

In an August 1961 letter to his friend Paul Flamand, Feraoun further questioned his own role in the Centres Sociaux:

Where am I? I have left the school in order to become an Inspector in the Service des Centres Sociaux Éducatifs which is an institution for basic education charged with bringing a comprehensive assistance which allows the rural masses access to the modern world: literacy for adolescents and adults, men and women, sanitary education, rural development, professional, social and civic education. In principle, a very grand program, very interesting: the old job as a teacher in the village systematized, codified, officially encouraged, supported…. Three times over, alas! It should have been done in 1950 and now no one believes in it: neither the administration, nor the educators, nor the users. Maybe we should come back to it when the killing and self-deception has stopped. In itself, it is great, even a coup. But all is divided by the incertitude that fogs the street, and fills it with the most general agony and the most narrow-minded hatred. No one wants to do good any more.78

Like Feraoun, Hammoutene argued that France should have made efforts to improve relations between the French and Algerians long before the war began. In 1956 he wrote that “after a century” of “waste and errors” it was ironic that France finally attempted to “build a just and fraternal Franco-Muslim community.”79 However, now that the war had started, France’s true self was revealed. The outdated value of colonialism could be legitimately questioned: “The role of France is not to oppress, but to help the Algerian people liberate themselves. In the ascension of the North African people toward the light, the role of France should consist in breaking the limits of a feudal administration founded on arbitrary inequality and social injustice” (62–63).

But to move to this next step France, and especially its liberals, would have to recognize the fundamental hypocrisy of the West. In this sense, both Feraoun and Hammoutene remained extremely critical of the Janusfaced West vis-à-vis Algeria. In the extraordinary international confusion at the end of 1956—the events of Hungary, the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Israel’s attack on Egypt, the British and French attack on Port Said— both men criticized the West’s covert racism as evidenced in the duplicitous outrage against the Soviet suppression of Budapest and the failure to react against France’s war on the Algerian people. Feraoun, in showing his distaste for this split personality, asked why the scandal of Hungary could not equally apply to the scandalous colonial war France waged against Algeria. “Is it because the world that sees us suffer is not convinced that we are humans? It is true that we are only Muslims. That may be our unforgivable crime. That is a question I would like to discuss with Sartre or Camus or Mauriac. Why? Yes, why?”80

Hammoutene added that the willingness of the West to turn its back on the domination of the Arab people had been the cause of the Algerian peasants’ misery, contrary to what Soustelle had argued during his tenure as governor general. However, in the face of the end of “Western imperialism,” Hammoutene continued, “the profound error of the West is to believe that its authority would rest uncontested.”81

At the Barricades and on Trial, Again?

As Algerian intellectuals such as Feraoun and Hammoutene assessed the role of France and the West during the war, the French government found itself on the brink of another military coup in Algiers. Again, a government crisis merged with indictments against the Centres. Colonel Jean Gardes, a committed Algérie française advocate and head of the army’s Fifth Bureau (the “psychological warfare” division) was found to be working with the angry mob of ultras that again laid siege to the government headquarters and other public buildings in Algiers on January 23, 1960. On January 24, Gardes was ordered out of Algiers by General Challe, in charge of the French military in Algiers. Despite the government’s attempts to calm the uprising of the Algérie française forces, a civil war started in Algiers, and for the first time since 1871 the French army was forced to fire on violent civilian protestors behind the barricades.

On January 26 Colonel Argoud, considered by many to be the best mind in the army, suggested to Prime Minister Debré, who had just arrived in the city, that de Gaulle would either have to renounce his self-determination policy or be replaced.82 The army, which wanted to keep Algeria French, had displayed an ambivalent if not openly hostile attitude toward the policy and could not be counted on to put down the rebellion. Three days later, unclear as to the allegiance of military personnel in Algeria, de Gaulle made one of his most important national radio and television appearances, addressing the nation as “General de Gaulle.”83 The speech won over the possible military converts to the barricade rebellion. By February 1 the infamous rebellion was destroyed and those who had taken part in it either escaped or went to prison.

When the trial of those responsible for the barricade revolt began in November 1960, part of the defense strategy was to attack traitorous activities of the French administration itself. The Centres Sociaux Éducatifs again came into question. On December 12, Colonel Gardes, the only serving officer on trial, accused Aguesse and Lesne, the representatives of French national education in Algeria, of working for the FLN’s benefit. Because of them, Colonel Gardes claimed, the Muslims were calling for independence in the streets and chanting FLN slogans.

Colonel Gardes and others testified that the Centres had initiated sub-versive activities. During his own defense, Gardes accused the Centres of being in the service of the FLN. After Lesne’s arrival, Gardes claimed, “we [the army] saw the Service des Centres Sociaux peppered with agents whom we knew perfectly well to be men from the FLN, and among them important leaders of the FLN.”84 Gardes then recounted that, with the aid of the military, the secret police placed an undercover agent inside the Centres to investigate treasonous activity. Eventually, Gardes claimed, even the man who directed this secret intelligence operation, Colonel Ruyssen, quit out of disgust because although the “infiltration” of the Centres by the FLN was “known by all intelligence officers,” the French authorities refused to take it seriously. Gardes went on to report that of the last eighty members recruited by the Centres Sociaux, twenty-seven had recently left internment camps, “that’s to say, [they were] more or less important members of the FLN.” According to Gardes, because the military knew the internment camps to be true “breeding grounds for the FLN,” it was inexcusable that the Service recruit from them, especially considering that the Service was supposed to coordinate its recruiting efforts with the local administration and police. Gardes, whose ultimate defense of the military had been the accusations against those who had really “betrayed” France, closed his testimony by connecting the betrayal of France to de Gaulle’s self-determination policy:

I did not have the intention, your honor, to say all of this to you because these are affairs that are horrible for France. But today there are new deaths, and many people are surprised. The surprise is that Muslims enter the streets, like some hoped, chanting “Vive l’Algérie Algérienne,” “Vive de Gaulle.” And a great number cry: “Vive l’Algérie Algérienne,” “Vive l’indépendance.” They have ransacked, and they have killed.

Immediately after Gardes’s testimony, the new rector of the Academy of Algiers, Gilbert Meyer, criticized Gardes’s attempt to free himself by smearing the Centres Sociaux Éducatifs. In a letter to the minister of national education on December 14, 1960, Meyer wrote: “It is convenient that, in his irresponsible attempt to relieve himself of guilt, he [Gardes] incriminates a service that has been almost completely ignored and attempts to tarnish the reputation of others when he is led to defend his own.”85 Then, on December 27, Meyer publicly defended the Centres in the Algiers court on the same day that he issued a communiqué to the press. “It is not wrong,” he said, “that a certain number of errors and administrative irregularities were committed and obliged my predecessor [Capdecomme] to distance himself from the [former] Director of the Service [Aguesse] who assumed responsibility in 1955.”86 Since the time Lesne had taken over as director, he continued, “no contractual employee has been recruited without strictly observing the precautionary rules…. It is more deplorable that one could, in absolute irresponsibility, bring with such a lightness the false judgments on a service which functions regularly within the bosom of National Education and under the control of its leaders.” Therefore the accusations against the educational system in Algiers went beyond the “personal attacks” against the Centres Sociaux; they were meant as a challenge to the legitimacy of de Gaulle’s government.

In January Laurent Capdecomme, who had resigned as rector of the Academy of Algiers to become director of French higher education, appeared before the Algiers court. In his defense of the defamed director of the Centres, Capdecomme claimed that, “of all the functionaries” he knew, Lesne was “one of the most loyal and most devoted. His action [had] above all honored France as much as the Centres Sociaux.”87 In February Colonel Ruyssen counterattacked on the witness stand. With a staff composed of about “70 percent pro-FLN,” he argued, it “well seemed that the Centres were infiltrated by the FLN.”88 Nevertheless, as a result of the testimonies, Gardes was eventually acquitted.

Unofficially, Lesne acknowledged the effect of Gardes’s testimony about the Centres Sociaux Éducatifs. In a confidential letter dated February 20, 1961, Lesne wrote to the delegate general of Algeria that the “functioning of the Centres has suffered a great deal from this state of things, at all levels of the hierarchy. The personnel has clearly perceived the bad effect of the malevolent publicity derived from the declarations of the accused. Although I am personally brought into question, I nevertheless do not give any more importance to the declarations of Colonel gardes than they merit.”89 More important, Lesne noted with concern that a police chief had recently erroneously stated to a colleague of the rector that certain members of the Centres Sociaux Éducatifs had in fact, since October 1959, recruited educators without asking beforehand for the approval of the police. “I consider this accusation very bad,” Lesne wrote, affirming that he had made all dossiers of future employees open to police and military investigators.

Assassination at El Biar: The Murder of Franco-Muslim Rapprochement

On August 21, 1961, Lesne decided to leave the Centres Sociaux Éducatifs and accept a professorship in ethnology and sociology at the University of Algiers. Directorship passed to Maxime Marchand, a French writer of distinction, a doctor of letters, and a veteran French educator in Algeria. By this time, violence had escalated to an uncontrollable level. Peace talks and the possibility of a settlement were underway. Both the OAS and the FLN were engaged in a high-pitched battle of terrorism and counterterrorism.

Now working for the Centres, Feraoun and Hammoutene were disturbed by the violence. But toward the end of the war the two men diverged in their interpretations of Algeria’s future. Feraoun, though still an undeniable humanist, began to despair regarding the possibility of future Franco-Muslim solidarity. By September 1961, according to Feraoun, solidarity had been destroyed by the war’s violence: “Even if France is successful in removing itself and its soldiers, the game is underway between the indigenous people and the Europeans, and it will terminate to the advantage of one or the other of the protagonists.”90

As discouraged as he was by the increasing violence, Hammoutene responded differently to his calling by the Centres Sociaux Éducatifs, which he described as the “vast field of psychological observation where I will learn to know man in the ordinary sense of the word, man as life’s actor.”91 Hammoutene seemed to find in the Centres a personal means to achieve leadership. In reference to perception by his colleagues he wrote: “I am not an Arab with a [personality] complex; my dignity will be protected whatever the price. It is a matter of showing that a Muslim has the responsibility to show himself equal to the importance of the position confided to him, that he can assume the responsibilities as leader of the Service.” A month later he wrote that an important part of this responsibility was the “protection of the love of Man.” Rooted within the love of man, for which Hammoutene expressed unflinching belief, he was certainly aware of the impact of politics on the Centres.92 Moreover, like Feraoun, he realized that the antagonism between the two communities and between the OAS and the FLN did directly affect the Centres, but Hammoutene hoped one would realize that there was more to do than to “tear each other up” (139). Ultimately, directly in line with the liberal individualist philosophy expressed by Aguesse, Hammoutene wrote that the Centres could eventually play an important role in this realization by helping men and women “become conscious of their dignity” and in this way overcome their misery (144).

Perhaps the Algerian intellectuals realized too well that getting to this new stage would be difficult. For example, on February 17, 1962, in the letter to his lifelong friend Emmanuel Roblès, less than a month before he was assassinated, Feraoun seemed to foreshadow the tragic events of March 15.93 “I am well set up at Clos-Salembier,” he wrote, “but everything is poisoned, all seems to be resting on a volcano. We wait, like everyone else, that is all.”94 The last lines in his seven-year journal need no comment:

Terror reigns in Algiers…. No, of course, we no longer distin-guish between the courageous and the cowardly. Unless after living in fear for so long, we have all become insensitive and unaware. Of course, I do not want to die, and I certainly do not want my children to die. But I am not taking any special precautions, aside from those that have become habits for the past couple of weeks: limiting reasons to go out, stocking up for several days, cutting out visits to friends. Just the same, every time that anyone goes out, he comes back to describe a murder or report a victim.95

The next day Feraoun was shot twelve times with a machine gun, along with his five Centres Sociaux colleagues. Feraoun’s son Ali wrote in a letter to Emmanuel Roblès directly after the murder: “I saw him at the morgue. Twelve bullets, but not one on his face. My father was beautiful, but completely frozen as though he did not want to look at anybody. There were fifty, maybe a hundred, like him, on tables, on benches, on the floor, everywhere. They had laid my father down on a table, in the center” (315).

There was a nationwide protest against the massacre of the six men working for the Centres Sociaux. French and Algerian commentators unanimously deplored it. Denis Forestier interpreted the crimes of El Biar in an article titled “Crime against Culture.” The OAS, he wrote, was the “organization born of the criminal action of felon officers, of civilians without scruples, supported by the ‘desperados’ of youth, which has attained the highest level of nihilism.”96 The crime was against “culture” because these educators were attacked for their devotion to ameliorating the conditions of the Muslim masses. The persecution of the Centres was begun by those seeking to destroy the true promotion of peace. Despite being endangered by the activities of the fascists, Fourestier claimed, the educators continued to work for the expression of peace. It was Colonel Gardes, that “Machiavelli of the OAS,” who had accused the Centres of being a holdout for the FLN. “How could that criminal felon have not set his killers against these educators, his fundamental adversaries?”

In Le Monde Germaine Tillion, the original architect of the Centres Sociaux, published an eloquent and furious article condemning the OAS for its fascist massacre of these innocent men. Like other commentators, she recounted her profound admiration for Mouloud Feraoun: “This honest man, this good man, this man who never did wrong to anyone, and who devoted his life to the public good, and who was one of the greatest writers in Algeria, has been assassinated…. Not by accident, not by mistake, but called by his name and killed with preference. This man who believed in humanity moaned and agonized four hours,97 not by the fault of a microbe, of car brakes that did not work, of a thousand accidents which are on the lookout for our lives, but because it [his assassination] entered into the imbecilic calculations of murdering monkeys who make the law in Algeria.”98 What made this crime against Feraoun and his five colleagues particularly heinous was that the fascists in the OAS had murdered several men who, regardless of their religions and national background, were unified in the common and sublime goal of protecting the children in Algeria. In fact, this care for Algeria’s youth is what probably mandated their execution in the minds of the OAS.99 It isone of the most tragic ironies of the French-Algerian War that on March 18, 1962, the day the Evian Accords were signed, the lives of the six men massacred at El Biar were celebrated at the cemetery of El Alia, a town on the outskirts of Algiers. It was a day of peace, mourning, and bitter ironies. At the sides of the families of the slain were the rector of the University of Algiers (Gilbert Meyer), the French delegate general (Jean Morin), the French minister of public works (Pierre Guillaumat), and the French minister of national education (Lucien Paye). Paye celebrated the lives and heroism of the six men and confessed his public shame that French people could be in any way associated with the death of these noble men: “That such a crime can have been inspired, decided, and committed by men who claim to be part of France seemed not so long ago impossible.”100

Yet, despite the public honor rendered to the victims of the “imbecilic” killing, the time had not come for reconciliation between the two communities. The French of Algeria faced a questionable future. While schools were temporarily suspended and while people were observing silence out of respect for those assassinated by the OAS, the General Association of the Students of Algeria, a right-wing student organization, issued a communiqué in Algiers on March 21 in which it claimed that the murder of the Centres Sociaux employees was being exploited by the French government— whereas, so the pied noir students complained, the murder of the European students by the FLN was being overlooked

By the time the French fled Algeria after the Evian Accords, all realistic hopes of lasting Franco-Muslim solidarity had been abandoned. In France and Algeria, roaming OAS squads continued to seek out victims, and it was not until 1963 that most leaders were captured. Ironically Jacques Soustelle, the man responsible for the creation of the Centres Sociaux, was then living in exile from France because he had become one of four leaders of the Conseil National de la Résistance, widely considered the political wing of the OAS. When 90 percent of the French population left, the OAS feverishly destroyed hospitals, schools, agricultural resources, communications, and administrative fabrics. If they could no longer enjoy their former lifestyle, they would assure that the new Algerian nation also could not. For the next few years, under Ahmed Ben Bella and then Houari Boumediene, Algeria was faced with reconstructing its distorted economy and identity.

In retrospect, it is possible to see that the educational attempts of the Centres Sociaux represented the last noble but impossible effort to build a bridge of fraternity between the French and Algerians. Faced as they were with Algeria’s turbulence, their labors of keeping fraternity alive were simply unequal to the violence and to the politics of decolonization. Had such an effort to “modernize” the Algerian population been activated before the war began, Feraoun and Hammoutene freely acknowledged, the situation might indeed have turned out differently. However, as evidenced in the trials of its members in 1957 and 1959, as well as in the continued accusations of police and military authorities, an apolitical educational philosophy simply did not conform to the pressures of the wartime hysteria. Consequently, the “third way” efforts of its original leader, Charles Aguesse, appeared hopelessly anachronistic.

This is not to argue that there was no utility in the programs instituted by the Service. The very fact that the Service was not victimized by the FLN, as it had been by the OAS, testified, according to former members, that the Service was seen as helpful to Algeria’s postwar future.101 It was widely acknowledged that after liberation the Algerian leaders realized the need for an elite and a mass capable of making the transition to a modern economy. Hence the need to provide the population with basic literacy, agricultural education, medical attention, and light industrial experience was seldom, if ever, challenged by the rebellion’s leadership.

The Service was truly the final attempt to bridge the gap between the metropolitan French government and the Muslim community in Algeria. Unfortunately, the bridge of reform was constructed over a dangerous abyss of extremism and the bridge itself was engulfed in a chilling fog of uncertainty. When the ultras looked at the bridge from below, all they saw was a wobbly structure that allowed their “enemies” to cross to revolution. From above—from the far-removed safety of metropolitan France— the French government in Paris continually tinkered with a design it knew it had constructed on a major twentieth-century fault line. Those on the bridge, those trying to offer both sides of the Franco-Muslim community safe passage, felt only the fog’s cold bite closing in on them and the tremors racing through the suspended structure. All they eventually heard were the shouts of hostility rising from the depths of the abyss—until, finally, six innocent and noble intellectuals were gunned down on a hot, March morning at El Biar in 1962. On that fateful day, French extremists pulled the only surviving bridge of Franco-Muslim solidarity into the abyss.

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