Free A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 by Alistair Horne Page A

the end of the year. Then, in January 1944, de Gaulle gave an epoch-making declaration in Brazzaville; it was French policy, he announced, amid some typical oratorical ambiguities “to lead each of the colonial peoples to a development that will permit them to administer themselves, and, later, to govern themselves”. Algerian Muslims were offered equal rights with French citizens, and an increase in the proportion of representatives in local government. To the Algerian nationalists this was little more than Blum-Viollette warmed up, and, by 1944, it was too little too late. (Nor, indeed — like other promises of reform — was the Brazzaville declaration ever to be implemented.) Abbas’s reaction was to bury the hatchet with Messali, and on 14 March in the fateful town of Sétif, and in another rare moment of unity, all the principal components of nationalism joined hands in a new grouping called Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (A.M.L.). In the most precise terms yet, it restated its aim as being “to propagate the idea of an Algerian nation, and the desire for an Algerian constitution with an autonomous republic federated to a renewed French republic, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist”. This new brief moment of unity was to perish finally amid the bloodshed and recriminations of Sétif the following year; nevertheless, the A.M.L. declaration did establish a principle of immense political and propaganda importance. Indeed, in the opinion of Albert Camus the movement was “the most original and significant that has been seen to emerge since the beginnings of the conquest”.
    And so France in Algeria staggered from war into peace, her prestige in Algeria gravely tainted, her power and influence in the world sorely reduced. United in despair, the Algerian nationalists saw, in the ending of the war, prospects of a return to “colonialism as usual”, a powerful French army returning to police the country and aid the pieds noirs prevent implementation of the reforms they so ardently demanded. The scene was set for the terrible, unforeseen and unexpected explosion at Sétif — and, in its wake, l’heure du gendarme .
    [ 1 ] In an interview with the author in October 1973, President Bourguiba of Tunisia persisted in the belief that “more than 50,000” had been killed after Sétif. Maître Teitgen, the liberal secretary-general of the Algiers prefecture in 1956–7, told the author that he reckoned the Muslim dead at “probably 15,000”. The discrepancy in the figures may (according to Robert Aron) be partly accounted for by the fact that many of the inhabitants of suspect mechtas “disappeared” into the hills in advance of the army ratissages , and were thus subsequently accounted for among the presumed dead.
     
    [ 2 ] There are at least two schools of thought on the origins of pied noir; one, on account of the black polished shoes worn by the French military; the other based on the somewhat patronising view of metropolitan Frenchmen that the colons had had their feet burned black by an excess of the African sun.
     
    [ 3 ] Meaning, literally, the “land of the setting sun”, the Maghreb embraces the western territories of the North African littoral: Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
     
    [ 4 ] It would be unfair to extend it too far, as the British had never colonised India with a view to permanent settlement; to correspond with the pied noir problem there would have had to have been roughly 30 million Britons in India in 1947.
     
    [ 5 ] The Algerian equivalent of pasha.
     
    [ 6 ] The offices of Turco-Arab origin, cadi=judge and caid =a local governor, should not be confused.
     
    [ 7 ] Hadj is a title bestowed on Muslims who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
     
    [ 8 ] It will be noted that many of the nationalist intellectuals (like Ben Khedda, president of the provisional Algerian government in 1962, who was also a pharmacist) were doctors, pharmacists or lawyers — professions where Muslims generally