Pod Insights Empire: World History 378. Algerian Revolution: Birth of Independence (Ep 4) About this episode How did the French use systemic torture during the Battle of Algiers? Which army generals plotted to overthrow the French president? Why did the bloody birth of an independent Algeria herald further trouble to come?
In the fourth episode of this series, William and Anita explore the bloody road to the declaration of Algerian Independence. They discuss France’s horrifying use of torture, the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and the historic 1962 Évian Accords.
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3:14 Speaker 03 Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand.
3:17 Speaker 02 And me, William Durham. This is episode four of our Algerian series. Now, in the last episode, we saw how this nationalist military group, the FLN, brought terror into the heart of the French settler community in Algeria with the Philippile massacre, then the French response, which was even more brutal, and finally, the opening of a new front in the Casper of Algiers. In today's episode, we reach for the most famous and morally complex chapter of the Algerian War of Independence. The Battle of Algiers is one of the greatest political films ever made, and here we are exploring the true history that it's based upon.
3:59 Speaker 02 Now, in the last episode, we introduced one of the key leaders of the FLN, Sadi Yasef. In the famous 1966 film, he actually played himself. As we said last time, Yasef was a former baker from the Casper, the medieval citadel at the top of the city of Algiers. And he transformed the Casper's medieval warren of alleyways and flat-roofed mud houses into a genuine military asset, with hidden rooms and bomb factories concealed beneath ordinary workshops. And his most devastating tactical innovation was to use Algerian women dressed in French fashions to carry bombs past French checkpoints.
4:38 Speaker 02 But at the beginning of 1957, he was to meet a formidable new French adversary, the brutal General Massu.
4:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, let me tell you a bit about General Massu. So in January 1957, the French government handed police powers over the city of Algiers to General Jacques Massu and his 10th Paratroop Division. He was 50 years old. He was a veteran of the Free French Forces and Indochina, Indochine, a bull-necked man who believed the FLN's urban campaign could be broken by the application of sheer force. And if that didn't work, then more force. That was his attitude. And his mandate, granted by the socialist French government of Guimollet, was effectively unlimited. You can do what you want. That meant to him that his officers had carte
5:29 Speaker 03 blanche. And the kind of thing that they did, Willie, is shocking, frankly, isn't it? From those who are in uniform and who have a set of codes supposedly to live by, none of that was present in the response from him.
5:42 Speaker 02 Massu plays his first card when the FLN calls a general strike across Algiers in late January 1957 to coincide with the United Nations debate on Algeria. Massu unleashes his paratroopers, who break the strike in a way that leaves no one with any doubt on the nature of French authority. They drive armoured cars up to shuttered Muslim shops, rip off the shutters, and then soldiers up into the apartments where they drag Algerian workers out of their homes and into trucks to force them to work. The message was simple. The FLN does not control the city, we do, and we have demonstrated this. And then Massu
6:27 Speaker 02 turns to the harder problem of deconstructing the bombing network.
6:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, now, I mean, we already described how complicated this network is. And the only way you're going to crack the cells or make people talk is torture. And Massu's powers do exactly that. They systematically torture thousands of Algerians who they pick up in the caspian. And look, the the methods are awful. They're also well documented. You have this thing called a gegeen, which is a field telephone with that, you know, one of those old ones with a hand crank that generates an electrical charge. And instead of being attached to any apparatus, they take those electrodes and they put them to victims' fingers, to their ears, to their genitals, frankly. And then it is, you know, torture through electric shock. They also have this
7:16 Speaker 03 thing called the Benoit, which is, you know, it's waterboarding. That's what we'd call it today, but it's simulated drowning. They hold the victim's head underwater until they lose consciousness. Then they get them up, revive them, and they repeat and repeat and repeat. And some of it is really positively medieval, you know, suspending human beings in stress positions by, you know, with ropes, the kind of thing you would see in sort of old manuscripts. And these things are being used on people.
7:43 Speaker 02 In the Spanish Inquisition.
7:45 Speaker 03 In the Spanish Inquisition, exactly what I was thinking. So, you know, and then and beatings and sleep deprivation, and the extensive use of sexual violence against Muslim women. All of this to get them to talk, to tell them names, name names, name places. And, you know, by any means, they were going to get this information. And really, some didn't make it through the torture, did they?
8:07 Speaker 02 Many didn't. Many die under torture. Others, an estimated 3,000 in the Battle of Algiers alone, simply disappear. They're held in secret, killed and buried without record. And the paras develop a new practice that they cheerfully nickname Big Ears Prawns. When they take prisoners, they bind their arms and legs and they drop them out of helicopters into the sea off Algiers, where they drown.
8:32 Speaker 03 This is the kind of stuff that we hear, you know, from Pinochet and others, you know, it's horrific. So you deny a person their life, you deny the family the right to mourn over a body. It's meant to strike terror into hearts. Masu's intelligence officer is a man called Colonel Roger Trinkie, and he sets up an informer network. And this informer network covers every street in Algiers. So you get one informer per block, mapping the entire social fabric of the city. And then he's got sort of these colleagues taking the intelligence and drawing up this vast pyramid chart, mapping the entire covert structure.
9:11 Speaker 02 Oranigram, they call it.
9:13 Speaker 03 They are, very good, you know, of the FLN network. And again, this also is reminiscent to me, Willie, of, you know, the way in which the Brits try to get information on the IRA and what the IRA were doing, you know, you, you take people in for questioning, sometimes using methods that you wouldn't want brought before Parliament, and you, that way, sort of map, who is the hierarchy, who is where, and where do you hit?
9:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, this is now the mid 1950s. This is exactly what the Brits are doing at the same time in Malaya, they'll do later in Cyprus, in Kenya. This has become a sort of post-war book, but the French seem to be particularly brutal. In February 1957, they capture the FLN's political mastermind in Algiers, Labi Ben Mahidi. He was secretly hanged by a French death squad in such a way that it looked like a suicide. And this is something the French government only acknowledged as recently as 2021. In September 1957, Yassif Sadi himself is finally captured, along with Zoradrif, the
10:20 Speaker 02 woman that let off the bomb in the milk bar.
10:24 Speaker 03 A few weeks later, French forces corner a man called Ali Lapointe. And this is actually Yassif's deadliest enforcer, and he has a really interesting background as well, okay? So he's, he's a former pimp, he's a street boxer, he is the man who Yassif sends out to terrify anybody who needs either dragging into line or is suspected of being an enforcer, and he's hiding in his Casper hideout. When he refuses to surrender, they blow the entire building apart. So Ali Lapointe dies in the rubble, along with two associates, and a 12-year-old boy who's just been sheltering with them, and then 17 of his neighbours. The bombings.
11:07 Speaker 03 Stop as a result of this. So France, you know, declares that it has won the Battle of Algiers, but the world does not yet know about the atrocities that the French have committed. And that is going to be a shock to the system, the international system.
11:23 Speaker 02 The photographs and testimonies that do eventually leak out, above all Henri Alex, The Question, published in 1958, a first hand account of torture methods used on the Algerian community newspaper by French paratroopers, is a book that is banned in France almost immediately, but sells nonetheless about hundreds of thousands of copies. And this is the thing that really galvanised opposition to the war among French intellectuals, French trade unions, and the international community.
11:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that every Frenchman who didn't oppose the war was complicit in this torture. You've got the Catholic intellectual François Morier, who publicly says that, you know, how could France condemn Nazi methods while behaving exactly the same way? And within the French Army's officer corps, the Battle of Algiers produces something maybe even more dangerous than bad publicity. It's a conviction that France's politicians will never make an honest peace in Algeria. And that that's really important, because when you have this, this doubt in the leadership, you have a crisis on the horizon. And that crisis hits in May 1958. It's one of the
12:36 Speaker 03 most extraordinary political moments in modern French history, I would say. Six prime ministers in four years consumed by the question of Algeria.
12:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, this is what I suppose Brexit has been over the last 10 years in in British politics, the way we now go through our prime ministers. And in this case, it's the whole issue. You have a million pieds de mort. It's not just simple question like the British in India of of pulling out. No one in British India has got farms, vineyards, businesses. But that's not the case in Algeria. And the pieds de morts are an enormous force. They have many sympathisers in France. And on the 13th Of May, nineteen fifty-eight, Piennois settlers stormed the French government buildings in Algiers furious at the execution of French prisoners by the FLN,
13:28 Speaker 02 convinced that the government in Paris was about to surrender to the nationalists.
13:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, and the army in Algeria is is so shaken by all of this. They were now on the verge of a coup against the civilian government of France. So, you know, in in Paris, it's felt and it is true, the politicians capitulate. You've got General Charles de Gaulle, you know, the the man who spent the war in London, broadcasting to his his Frenchmen to resist the Nazis during World War Two. He's the one they turn to. They say, you know what? We don't trust this breed of politicians at all. We need you, General, we need you to come back. So just please take control because everything feels out of control.
14:12 Speaker 03 And with that, with de Gaulle coming back, the Fourth Republic, you could say is effectively over. And de Gaulle, what he does is very interesting. He flew over to Algiers and he tells the Piennois exactly what they want to hear. So he stood on the balcony of the Government General Building in Algiers on the fourth of June, nineteen fifty-eight, looked out over this enormous crowd of European settlers and and French soldiers who'd brought him to power. And he says, je vous ai compris, I have understood you. And the crowd goes nuts, they go wild. Now, what they hear, you can kind of hear what you want to hear in that. It's not explicit, but what they hear is a promise that Algeria will remain French.
14:56 Speaker 03 De Gaulle is one of them. He is, you know, the savior of the Piennois. He'd understood them perfectly. But you know what? That is a really nebulous statement. I have understood you. And they are about to find out that he didn't mean that at all. It's going to take four years and a great deal more blood, but their hearts will eventually be broken by de Gaulle.
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15:58 Speaker 04 Well, we will be exploring big questions like how has the influence of the Ayatollahs shaped Iran since the 1979 revolution? Does the Islamic Republic's grip appear to be fracturing? And what role have other nations played in shaping Iran's fate?
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18:06 Speaker 02 Welcome back. Well, I suppose the next bit of the story is the whole episode of the Maurice line. Now, this is named after the French Defence Minister, André Maurice, and it is an electrified fence which runs nearly 400 kilometres along Algeria's borders with Tunisia and Morocco. Heavily mined, it's lit by floodlets, monitored by radar, patrolled continuously. And its purpose is to prevent the FLN's exterior army, the forces training and re-equiping in Tunisia, from reinforcing the fighters inside Algeria. And it effectively works. It does stop them getting through.
18:45 Speaker 02 And combined with General Maurice's relentless military sweeps through the interior, the French army by 1960 have killed or captured the great majority of the FLN's fighters inside Algeria.
19:02 Speaker 03 So while France might have been winning the military war, the FLN and their provisional government, which is known as the GPRA, the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, it's winning something arguably much more important. It's winning international recognition. It's winning hearts and minds, if you like, and it's winning the argument with the United Nations because all these stories of torture are coming out. You've got the lack of faith in French political leaders and with de De Gaulle back on the scene, you've got a new man and a new mind in charge. And he understands something that, you know, other soldiers haven't been able to bring themselves to accept. You might get a military victory, you might do that. But a military victory is not the same as a political victory.
19:46 Speaker 03 And it is not the same as settling this issue. This issue will never go back to what it was. You're never going to have Algerians content with being this sort of satellite vassal state of France. It's not going to happen anymore, that genie's out of the bottle. So in 1959, De Gaulle makes a really big decision.
20:05 Speaker 02 De Gaulle announces on television that Algerians would have the right of self determination, the right to choose their own future. And I think his recognition is that such is the polarization in the country, that you cannot have one tenth of the country ruling over nine tenths majority. He just thinks that that is not sustainable. It was fine while many Algerians were sitting on the French, as we saw in the last episode, and were not committed one way or the other. But the sheer brutality, the killings, the extrajudicial murders and torture have turned all Algerians against France. And nine tenths of a country will not accept the government of the one tenth. So he announces self determination.
20:49 Speaker 02 And the reaction, of course, from the pieds noirs and from the army officers who brought him to power was that De Gaulle had committed an act of pure, undiluted betrayal.
20:59 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, he's he's kind of cut their hearts out. You know, that's not what they heard him say from the balcony. They feel angry. That's not what they that's not what they heard. So in January 1960, these furious pieds noirs, they rise up. And you've got barricades going up in Algiers, you've got French gendarmes being shot. And and for a week, it looked as if the settlers might succeed in reversing De Gaulle's policy just by sheer force of violence. But you know what? This violence is is is short but sharp. It lasts about a week and then it collapses.
21:34 Speaker 02 And the generals tried to rebel too. In April 1961, four retired generals seize Algiers, a proper coup d'etat.
21:43 Speaker 02 For forty eight hours, it appears that France is about to experience its first successful military coup since the French Revolution. The Gaul appears on television in uniform, his voice controlled and contemptuous. And he addresses the young conscripts directly. This, of course, is Greg Gamble. He says, "I forbid every Frenchman, and above all, every single soldier, to execute any of their orders." He carries a transistor radio into the camera shot. The young conscripts in Algeria had their transistor radios and they heard their president. The putsch collapses in just forty eight hours and the four generals go underground.
22:25 Speaker 02 I think it's worth pausing before we get to this final bit, the end game of the revolution, to take stock of what this war is actually costing the French, because the numbers, when you add them up, will explain why even those who wanted to win were beginning to understand why that winning was impossible.
22:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, sort of in the height of the conflict, you've got five hundred thousand French troops being deployed in Algeria to fight a guerrilla war. And that is expensive, you know, you don't send these people out with their, you know, their equipment and transport and billeting and everything else. It isn't cheap. So I think the annual budget deficit, which was already severe after the war, it grows by thirty percent during this conflict with the Algerian uprising. So, you know, you've got, I think it's sort of at one point reaches some nine hundred and twenty five billion francs per year, that's how much it costs. So, you know, what that, what does that do back at home in France? Well, it makes everything more expensive.
23:24 Speaker 03 You know, retail prices are going up, people, you know, grumbling about getting food in the markets that it costs so much. And we did already touch on the fact, Willie, that, you know, the political cost was even more dramatic, you know, six prime ministers swallowed up by this one issue and you've got, you know, sort of no faith in the political classes from a country. This is what's really interesting, it's a country that has just thrown off the Nazis, that is just re-establishing what it is and what it is to be free French. Now what does it mean? So you've got almost a nervous breakdown in identity. What are we? What are we for? And how much is that? You know, all of that stuff completely combined into a crisis.
24:05 Speaker 02 And of course, no country likes to see its reputation tarnished. And for people to be aware suddenly that a military is committing atrocities, that the prisons are full of torture. We've seen a similar thing with Israel since the last couple of years. It's it's a massive reputational damage that a massive campaign of repression and torture inflicts on a country. It gives a country a bad, bad name. You see this, for example, in the United States, which had initially supported France, switching to abstaining on UN votes about Algeria. France's closest allies grew increasingly embarrassed by the association.
24:44 Speaker 02 The FLN has understood from the beginning that the war would be won not in the mountains of Kabylie by guerrilla warfare at night, but in the court of international opinion. And every French trustee was for them a victory. One thing we should talk about, though, Anita, and this is the true story behind the Day of the Jackal. Tell us about the OAS.
25:04 Speaker 03 Okay, so the OAS is the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète, the Organisation of the Secret Army, the OAS, which will spend the final months of French Algeria committing acts of violence that, you know what, made the FLN look like Boy Scouts, to be honest with you. And Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel, The Day of the Jackal, is based on a real event in which this organisation, the OAS, so incensed by the betrayal of de Gaulle, contracts a professional killer to take him out.
25:39 Speaker 02 I had no idea that this was. Did you know this was based on a true story? I didn't.
25:43 Speaker 03 I did. I did know this. But you know what? But I didn't realise just how organised the OAS was, you know. So they are organised. They planted bombs across Algeria and France, targeting anybody who was sympathetic to the FLN. And that included, by the way, French officials, you know, so their own countrymen, they're blowing them. Up, they are attempting to destroy anything that might survive independence. They have this this horrible, horrible motto, the suitcase or the coffin, you know, we are going to do this or we're going to die trying. And in the final weeks before, um, what is known as the Evian Accords, where, you know, this kind of negotiated peace and withdrawal is actually made real. The OAS
26:27 Speaker 03 goes into overdrive. They are, they're scorching earth wherever they go. They're burning universities, libraries, infrastructure, and there are just indiscriminate killings of Muslim Algerians in the street at random. It is like a rampage of, of violence and terror.
26:47 Speaker 02 So peace is finally agreed in 1962, after nearly two years of on and off negotiations. This peace is signed at Evian-Le-Bas, where Evian water comes from, on the 18th of March, 1962. France recognizes Algerian sovereignty, including over the Sahara, which is something they wanted to hold on to because oil had just been found there.
27:09 Speaker 03 After an eight-year campaign, tremendous violence, blood and coin spent in such, I mean, extraordinary and horrific amounts. A line is drawn, but it's not a line, is it? It's more of a dotted line.
27:23 Speaker 02 It's a very jagged line. So again, this is something that I didn't notice. I did the reading for this series. Uh, and to me, this is the single most fascinating thing of the whole story. Because on a plane to Algiers in 1962, at the end of this episode of the story, is a certain young paratrooper, a 34-year-old soldier named Jean-Marie Le Pen. He boards the plane at Algiers and he brings with him the resentments of an entire generation that believes France has betrayed its soldiers and settlers. He also brings with him the political ambitions of a man who has already served in the National Assembly and knew precisely what to do with the moment
28:06 Speaker 02 that was gathering among the Pire Noirs, who are now flooding back to south, finding themselves in poor suburbs of France, some of them finding, uh, their way to the south coast, which is the kind of landscape they'd left behind in Algeria. And the story of what Le Pen builds and what his daughter is continuing to do today as we speak, as the new election comes into view.
28:30 Speaker 03 So you're, I mean, you're talking about Marine Le Pen, Marine Le Pen, who is starting and, and is gaining a lot of momentum.
28:36 Speaker 02 Now, this is the subject of our final two episodes in this series. And I have to say that when I was originally planning this series, I thought we were going to be ending it with the end of the Battle of Algiers. But actually, the most important and the most fascinating parts of the story lie ahead. A referendum, of course, follows on the first of July, 1962, Algeria's vote for independence by nearly 6 million votes to 16,000. That's how polarised things have become by this stage. And on the 5th of July, 1962, the anniversary of the 1830 French invasion, Algeria is finally independent. The celebrations in Algiers were enormous and uncontrollable. The eight-year war was over.
29:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, but you know, despite the celebrations, Algeria is going to suffer some more because the FLN immediately begins its own civil war, if you like, about who's going to be in charge, who's going to be running this new state. And, and we'll explore that in more detail in the next episode. If you don't want to wait, and if you want to hear that episode right now, just head to the link in the bio and join the Empire Club. You'll get early access, you'll get special bonus episodes. And if you want extra insights into this really fascinating period of history, join the Empire Club because you will get a very special bonus episode on the experience of Algerians who are living in the bagners of Paris. So I really honestly urge you to listen to that. It's a fantastic listen. Till
30:04 Speaker 03 the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.
30:07 Speaker 02 And goodbye from me, William Derumbo.
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