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The French communist party and the Algerian war
REVIEWS
industrial workers. Always careful to stand back from the more subjective and exaggerated accounts, and to avoid contemporary moralising judgements, Braun teases out his own analysis. This finally includes a stress on the emergence of a new work ethic. The peasant structure had little place for competition, individual effort and social advancement but the new culture was founded on all three and required a considerable restructuring of communal norms and solidarities. Rooted in the soil of the agrarian past these included the acceptance of periodic poverty and crises and a refusal to allow the dual economy and proto-industry to collapse and leave the field to factory industry in the nineteenth century. Charles Tilly’s assertion a few years ago that this was the most important untranslated work of social history in recent decades is no overstatement. It is now available to a wider audience and to a new generation of scholars to whom it will no doubt be a source of continuing inspiration. PAT HUDSON
University of Liverpool
RAYMOND
F. BET-IS, France and Decolonisation I900-I960
(London:
Macmillan,
1991.
Pp. viii + 152. f9.99 paperback) DANIELE JOLY, The French Communist Party and the Algerian War (London:
Macmillan,
1991, Pp. xviii+ 181. E35.00) High on a French hilltop, overlooking the rolling countryside of Picardy, lies the sprawling military cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette. In the midst of the endless rows of little French crosses, there is a tall tower. Inside is a sombre room, guarded by a silent old man, chest emblazoned with medals. Four coffins lie side-by-side in the silent interior, each containing the remains of an unknown French soldier. The first three coffins carry similar tablets: “Ici repose un soldat inconnu de la guerre 1914-18, . . . de la guerre 1939-1945, . . . de la guerre d’Indochine”. On the fourth coffin, the format changes: “Ici repose un soldat inconnu des operations d’Afrique du Nord”. This language is precise and deliberate. Officially, the Algerian war of independence, an eightyear campaign involving hundreds of thousands of French and Algerian troops which produced a million casualties, was not a war at all but a series of “operations”. Although it took place in Algeria, at that time an integral part of the French Republic, the tablet suggests an unspecified campaign that happened vaguely in “Afrique du Nord”. The word “Algerie”, deprived of its once-familiar suffix “francaise”, was clearly unacceptable. Here was a war which dared not speak its name. This language reveals something of the bitter legacy left by the violence and political upheaval accompanying French decolonisation. It also points to a fundamental, paradox. The French empire (nearly ten percent of the earth’s land surface-“a deuce of a lot of blue” mused Conrad’s Marlowe over a map in Heart of Darkness) was carved out, despite the overwhelming indifference of French public opinion, by ninetheenth-century military adventurers operating beyond the control of political authority in France. It was then consolidated and expanded by a small group of businessmen, politicians and academics (including geographers) whose influence over the course of events under the unsteady Third Republic far outweighed their popular support. Yet, as the calls for colonial reform and eventual independence gathered momentum after 1945, successive French political leaders, including those on the Left, either refused to listen or were prevented from acting. As a result, France became embroiled in costly rear-guard campaigns to retain control of colonies whose original acquisition had been greeted with almost total disinterest. As Raymond Aron wrote in the midst of the Algerian war, “Once indecision and unauthorized acts together had brought on the explosion, the official slogan became ‘hold on’ (just as at Verdun)“.
346
REVIEWS
This paradox has stimulated considerable debate and the two books under review are to be welcomed as concise, well-informed additions to the literature. Raymond Betts, a leading authority on French imperialism, has produced an elegant general survey, written with a pleasing sense of irony and a keen eye for the arresting quotation. Betts contends that French decolonisation should not be seen as a single process, directed by an internal logic or general strategy. Rather, the retreat from empire was a dramatic, chaotic and turbulent series of events, animated by a bewildering cast of unpredictable individuals, groups and factions, operating in France, in the colonies and elsewhere in the world. To reflect this, Betts combines a conventional historical narrative with a much broader analysis of the culture of imperialism and anti-imperialism. Alongside his succinct passages on the political strategies of Ho-Chi Minh, Charles de Gaulle and Messali Hadj, one encounters lyrical sections on colonial expositions, the novels of Andre Malraux and Paul Maran, the poems of Leopold SCdar Senghor and Aimt Cesaire, and the development of kgritude literature and art. This combination of political and cultural analysis is a difficult objective in a short book and Betts is to be congratulated on a successful fusion of these different traditions. The curiously ineffective role of the Left as an anti-imperial force in French politics is a theme to which Betts devotes several pages. He correctly points out that colonialism in France has rarely been unequivocally rejected by the Left. Many of the early prophets of French colonialism saw themselves as radical socialists, dedicated to a new and harmonious connection between France and the external world. Engels and the SaintSimonians had welcomed the conquest and colonisation of Algeria as an opportunity to build a better society on the edge of a new continent and subsequent heroes of the French left, such as Jean Jaures and Bliste Reclus, were strangely reserved in their comments on the injustices of French colonialism. Indeed, the most vociferous anticolonialists were often conservative nationalists who opposed the “squandering” of French resources overseas, or liberal economists who saw formal empire as a threat to unfettered free trade. The Left’s confusion and vacillation was inherited by the French Communist Party, one of the largest and most effective left-wing organisations in western Europe. As Betts observes, “the new French Communist Party was anything but doctrinaire in colonial matters. It both vigorously condemned and remained studiously silent, the particular behaviour of the moment dependent on perceived political advantages and shifts in Soviet policy”. Daniele Joly, in her well-researched and more sharply-focused book, adds several nuances to this assessment. Drawing on newspaper articles, unpublished accounts and personal interviews, she charts the evolution of French left-wing thought about Algeria during the war of independence from 1954 to 1962. She argues that the French Communist Party failed to establish a coherent anti-war position because many leading communists, notably Maurice Thorez, were unwilling to sacrifice their potential support amongst a fundamentally conservative, pro-colonial working class, particularly in southern French cities. This created a good deal of tension within the party and a number of influential oppositionels began openly to challenge the party line over Algeria. Readers of this journal will be interested to note that Jean Dresch, the leading French geomorphologist and North Africanist, was one of the key figures in the movement opposing the Algerian war within the Communist Party, together with other academics working on the history and geography of the region such as Yves Lacoste, Andre Nouschi, Andre Prenant and Charles-Andre Julien. While French geographers had enthusiastically supported French colonialism in the late nineteenth century, by the 1950s some geographers with a knowledge of the region were campaigning openly For French withdrawal from Algeria. Despite these honourable stands, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Radical Left in France provided no clear lead for those opposing the Algerian war and that, as a result, the gruesome carnage continued longer than would otherwise have been the case. Although these two short books are written for different audiences and adopt rather different styles, they complement one another and
REVIEWS
provide the reader with clear, well-written history. University of Loughborough
347
accounts of an anxious period in French MICHAEL
J. HEFTERNAN
JOHN ARDAGH with COLIN JONES, Cultural Atlas of France (Oxford: Facts on File, 1991. Pp. 240. E19.95) There are many kinds of atlas. This one is the sort that makes youngsters fall in love with foreign places. It celebrates the diversity of France in lavish photographs of colordrenched landscapes, master works of art, and icons of popular culture. The text, pitched at a general audience, will entertain arm-chair travelers and students more than it will satisfy experts in French studies. Yet the authors’ focus on their core theme-the historical tension between centralization and decentralization in France-also gives this atlas depth. Jones, a social historian, had the task of condensing 1500 years of French history into eighty heavily illustrated pages. His text is a chronology of conquests and the unraveling of empire, economic growth and decline. Glimpses of the longue durPe come occasionally in summaries of demographic change. Some readers will drift away from the main text to linger over the “boxed features”, brief commentaries set off from the text which highlight famous people, places, and events, such as Joan of Arc and the Dreyfus Affair. It is telling that peasant life appears as one of these features rather than as an important element integrated into the historical section as a whole. Ardagh, a journalist and travel writer, was responsible for history since 1945 and for the two parts that follow. “France Today” begins with a sweeping assessment of politics, education, religion, and leisure that paints the French as a people struggling to break free of bureaucracy and traditional prejudices. (He is not worried about the resurgence in right-wing racism.) A second essay then explores the failure of post-war Paris in particular and France in general to inspire creative genius. Is this failure due in part to rebounding regional interests and governmental policies of decentralization? Ardagh does not go this far in “France Today,” and in his final section, “A Regional Portrait of France,” he drops contentious issues and assumes the tone of a very well-informed travel guide. Vignettes of the twelve main cultural regions of France (a more organic grouping, he argues, than the 22 official French regions) squeeze in a tremendous amount of information, most memorably about how each region’s character is rooted in its physical endowments. This is the most geographical part of the book. It balances the early sections’ preoccupation with Paris and the elites who have ruled French society, and it fleshes out the geographical overview begun in Part One, “Land, Climate, Peoples”. I am most impressed by this book’s consistent quality and visual beauty. The atlas is impeccably designed and produced, with exceptional attention to the subtle play of color across facing pages. Except for some annoying redundancies between text and captions (which will not trouble those who browse the captions only), the text is smooth and, under Ardagh’s hand, incisive. It was, one suspects, edited very well. The atlas depicts the whole of France, at the level of the nation and the region, with fine balance. Because Jones’s historical section slights the peasantry, however, and because Ardagh’s vignettes describe the vestiges of peasant culture (mainly as they survive in cuisine, ritual, and certain personality types), the book leaves one wondering just how strong regional cultures developed, rooted as they are in folkways and the farming economy. I wish that the authors had dug a little deeper into the rich analyses of the pays in recent French historical geography, at least to represent one or two pays in sufficient detail to give a sense of how regional culture evolved, and to introduce another scale of analysis.
industrial workers. Always careful to stand back from the more subjective and exaggerated accounts, and to avoid contemporary moralising judgements, Braun teases out his own analysis. This finally includes a stress on the emergence of a new work ethic. The peasant structure had little place for competition, individual effort and social advancement but the new culture was founded on all three and required a considerable restructuring of communal norms and solidarities. Rooted in the soil of the agrarian past these included the acceptance of periodic poverty and crises and a refusal to allow the dual economy and proto-industry to collapse and leave the field to factory industry in the nineteenth century. Charles Tilly’s assertion a few years ago that this was the most important untranslated work of social history in recent decades is no overstatement. It is now available to a wider audience and to a new generation of scholars to whom it will no doubt be a source of continuing inspiration. PAT HUDSON
University of Liverpool
RAYMOND
F. BET-IS, France and Decolonisation I900-I960
(London:
Macmillan,
1991.
Pp. viii + 152. f9.99 paperback) DANIELE JOLY, The French Communist Party and the Algerian War (London:
Macmillan,
1991, Pp. xviii+ 181. E35.00) High on a French hilltop, overlooking the rolling countryside of Picardy, lies the sprawling military cemetery of Notre Dame de Lorette. In the midst of the endless rows of little French crosses, there is a tall tower. Inside is a sombre room, guarded by a silent old man, chest emblazoned with medals. Four coffins lie side-by-side in the silent interior, each containing the remains of an unknown French soldier. The first three coffins carry similar tablets: “Ici repose un soldat inconnu de la guerre 1914-18, . . . de la guerre 1939-1945, . . . de la guerre d’Indochine”. On the fourth coffin, the format changes: “Ici repose un soldat inconnu des operations d’Afrique du Nord”. This language is precise and deliberate. Officially, the Algerian war of independence, an eightyear campaign involving hundreds of thousands of French and Algerian troops which produced a million casualties, was not a war at all but a series of “operations”. Although it took place in Algeria, at that time an integral part of the French Republic, the tablet suggests an unspecified campaign that happened vaguely in “Afrique du Nord”. The word “Algerie”, deprived of its once-familiar suffix “francaise”, was clearly unacceptable. Here was a war which dared not speak its name. This language reveals something of the bitter legacy left by the violence and political upheaval accompanying French decolonisation. It also points to a fundamental, paradox. The French empire (nearly ten percent of the earth’s land surface-“a deuce of a lot of blue” mused Conrad’s Marlowe over a map in Heart of Darkness) was carved out, despite the overwhelming indifference of French public opinion, by ninetheenth-century military adventurers operating beyond the control of political authority in France. It was then consolidated and expanded by a small group of businessmen, politicians and academics (including geographers) whose influence over the course of events under the unsteady Third Republic far outweighed their popular support. Yet, as the calls for colonial reform and eventual independence gathered momentum after 1945, successive French political leaders, including those on the Left, either refused to listen or were prevented from acting. As a result, France became embroiled in costly rear-guard campaigns to retain control of colonies whose original acquisition had been greeted with almost total disinterest. As Raymond Aron wrote in the midst of the Algerian war, “Once indecision and unauthorized acts together had brought on the explosion, the official slogan became ‘hold on’ (just as at Verdun)“.
346
REVIEWS
This paradox has stimulated considerable debate and the two books under review are to be welcomed as concise, well-informed additions to the literature. Raymond Betts, a leading authority on French imperialism, has produced an elegant general survey, written with a pleasing sense of irony and a keen eye for the arresting quotation. Betts contends that French decolonisation should not be seen as a single process, directed by an internal logic or general strategy. Rather, the retreat from empire was a dramatic, chaotic and turbulent series of events, animated by a bewildering cast of unpredictable individuals, groups and factions, operating in France, in the colonies and elsewhere in the world. To reflect this, Betts combines a conventional historical narrative with a much broader analysis of the culture of imperialism and anti-imperialism. Alongside his succinct passages on the political strategies of Ho-Chi Minh, Charles de Gaulle and Messali Hadj, one encounters lyrical sections on colonial expositions, the novels of Andre Malraux and Paul Maran, the poems of Leopold SCdar Senghor and Aimt Cesaire, and the development of kgritude literature and art. This combination of political and cultural analysis is a difficult objective in a short book and Betts is to be congratulated on a successful fusion of these different traditions. The curiously ineffective role of the Left as an anti-imperial force in French politics is a theme to which Betts devotes several pages. He correctly points out that colonialism in France has rarely been unequivocally rejected by the Left. Many of the early prophets of French colonialism saw themselves as radical socialists, dedicated to a new and harmonious connection between France and the external world. Engels and the SaintSimonians had welcomed the conquest and colonisation of Algeria as an opportunity to build a better society on the edge of a new continent and subsequent heroes of the French left, such as Jean Jaures and Bliste Reclus, were strangely reserved in their comments on the injustices of French colonialism. Indeed, the most vociferous anticolonialists were often conservative nationalists who opposed the “squandering” of French resources overseas, or liberal economists who saw formal empire as a threat to unfettered free trade. The Left’s confusion and vacillation was inherited by the French Communist Party, one of the largest and most effective left-wing organisations in western Europe. As Betts observes, “the new French Communist Party was anything but doctrinaire in colonial matters. It both vigorously condemned and remained studiously silent, the particular behaviour of the moment dependent on perceived political advantages and shifts in Soviet policy”. Daniele Joly, in her well-researched and more sharply-focused book, adds several nuances to this assessment. Drawing on newspaper articles, unpublished accounts and personal interviews, she charts the evolution of French left-wing thought about Algeria during the war of independence from 1954 to 1962. She argues that the French Communist Party failed to establish a coherent anti-war position because many leading communists, notably Maurice Thorez, were unwilling to sacrifice their potential support amongst a fundamentally conservative, pro-colonial working class, particularly in southern French cities. This created a good deal of tension within the party and a number of influential oppositionels began openly to challenge the party line over Algeria. Readers of this journal will be interested to note that Jean Dresch, the leading French geomorphologist and North Africanist, was one of the key figures in the movement opposing the Algerian war within the Communist Party, together with other academics working on the history and geography of the region such as Yves Lacoste, Andre Nouschi, Andre Prenant and Charles-Andre Julien. While French geographers had enthusiastically supported French colonialism in the late nineteenth century, by the 1950s some geographers with a knowledge of the region were campaigning openly For French withdrawal from Algeria. Despite these honourable stands, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Radical Left in France provided no clear lead for those opposing the Algerian war and that, as a result, the gruesome carnage continued longer than would otherwise have been the case. Although these two short books are written for different audiences and adopt rather different styles, they complement one another and
REVIEWS
provide the reader with clear, well-written history. University of Loughborough
347
accounts of an anxious period in French MICHAEL
J. HEFTERNAN
JOHN ARDAGH with COLIN JONES, Cultural Atlas of France (Oxford: Facts on File, 1991. Pp. 240. E19.95) There are many kinds of atlas. This one is the sort that makes youngsters fall in love with foreign places. It celebrates the diversity of France in lavish photographs of colordrenched landscapes, master works of art, and icons of popular culture. The text, pitched at a general audience, will entertain arm-chair travelers and students more than it will satisfy experts in French studies. Yet the authors’ focus on their core theme-the historical tension between centralization and decentralization in France-also gives this atlas depth. Jones, a social historian, had the task of condensing 1500 years of French history into eighty heavily illustrated pages. His text is a chronology of conquests and the unraveling of empire, economic growth and decline. Glimpses of the longue durPe come occasionally in summaries of demographic change. Some readers will drift away from the main text to linger over the “boxed features”, brief commentaries set off from the text which highlight famous people, places, and events, such as Joan of Arc and the Dreyfus Affair. It is telling that peasant life appears as one of these features rather than as an important element integrated into the historical section as a whole. Ardagh, a journalist and travel writer, was responsible for history since 1945 and for the two parts that follow. “France Today” begins with a sweeping assessment of politics, education, religion, and leisure that paints the French as a people struggling to break free of bureaucracy and traditional prejudices. (He is not worried about the resurgence in right-wing racism.) A second essay then explores the failure of post-war Paris in particular and France in general to inspire creative genius. Is this failure due in part to rebounding regional interests and governmental policies of decentralization? Ardagh does not go this far in “France Today,” and in his final section, “A Regional Portrait of France,” he drops contentious issues and assumes the tone of a very well-informed travel guide. Vignettes of the twelve main cultural regions of France (a more organic grouping, he argues, than the 22 official French regions) squeeze in a tremendous amount of information, most memorably about how each region’s character is rooted in its physical endowments. This is the most geographical part of the book. It balances the early sections’ preoccupation with Paris and the elites who have ruled French society, and it fleshes out the geographical overview begun in Part One, “Land, Climate, Peoples”. I am most impressed by this book’s consistent quality and visual beauty. The atlas is impeccably designed and produced, with exceptional attention to the subtle play of color across facing pages. Except for some annoying redundancies between text and captions (which will not trouble those who browse the captions only), the text is smooth and, under Ardagh’s hand, incisive. It was, one suspects, edited very well. The atlas depicts the whole of France, at the level of the nation and the region, with fine balance. Because Jones’s historical section slights the peasantry, however, and because Ardagh’s vignettes describe the vestiges of peasant culture (mainly as they survive in cuisine, ritual, and certain personality types), the book leaves one wondering just how strong regional cultures developed, rooted as they are in folkways and the farming economy. I wish that the authors had dug a little deeper into the rich analyses of the pays in recent French historical geography, at least to represent one or two pays in sufficient detail to give a sense of how regional culture evolved, and to introduce another scale of analysis.